BYOPuzzles

Build Your Own Puzzles is designed to strengthen concentration and memory and to catalyze creativity. These kaleidoscope images give you an opportunity to rehearse visual imagery skills that enhance thinking and complex problem solving. In order to solve the puzzle, you must notice details and the relationship between the details; then the details are rotated, flipped, and mirrored to create complex kaleidoscope patterns. You will then need to visualize the conditions that create the new design.

BYOPuzzles strengthen the right hemisphere of the brain, which is primarily responsible for visual perception. The visual perception skills needed to solve the puzzles include: shape perception and shape constancy, spatial relations, part/whole relationships, detail discrimination, figure ground differentiation, and pattern recognition. These puzzles will give you the power and the pleasure of creative thoughts while strengthening your communication and problem-solving ability.

How will this help me? Visual imagery is the foundation of abstract thinking and mathematics. Without visual imagery mathematics cannot be used to solve problems and to understand the world. Rehearsal with analytical perception puzzles such as BYOPuzzles, enhances communications and catalyzes creativity. For example, without a part-whole perspective, we tend to respond emotionally when we disagree because we have an all or nothing perspective; thus we may find it difficult to reach a compromise.

How does this work? Innovative and creative ideas begin with our ability to break the whole into parts, to subdivide the parts into other parts, and to reorganize the parts in relation to the whole. Part-whole analysis involves identifying the parts that constitute the function of the whole and recognizing how those parts work together to deliver that function. Recognizing how parts fit together and how they can be reorganized enables us to generate ideas that result in innovation and creativity. BYOPuzzles force you to focus on the process of analyzing and solving problems so that you can then take that experience and generalize or replicate it in other situations.