What is a puzzle, a brief definition. The history of the creation of the first puzzle
In which you need to create a mosaic from many fragments of a pattern of various shapes.
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✪ ASSEMBLY PUZZLES: How to quickly assemble a puzzle
Subtitles
Hello! My name is Andrey and I will tell and show you how to quickly assemble a puzzle. First, we will open the box with the puzzle and pour everything out of it. Now we will select from the total mass all the elements with a flat side and assemble a frame from them, after which we will sort our pile into several smaller piles with characteristic and expressed color, that is, let's sort it out by color, then you can start collecting parts of the whole by color or select the most characteristic elements of a face, symbols, small fish, birds or animals in the picture and collect them, and if after sorting it out into colors there is a small pile of neither this nor that you can continue assembling it from there and join parts with a pronounced color to these elements; after all the colored parts are joined with the frame, we get a completed picture and do not forget that in puzzles you need to pay attention not only to the colors but also to the shape of the elements especially joined lugs and lugs, corresponding to them, thank you for your attention. I wish everyone a good docking!
Types of puzzles
Currently exists large number various types and modifications of puzzles. When collecting them, the goal is the same - to obtain a single picture from individual elements. Puzzles are divided by the size of the elements and the size of a single picture. The complexity of the puzzle within one number of elements is determined by the pattern, and the main criterion is the number of elements itself - the higher it is, the larger and more complex the puzzle.
The classic number of elements in a small puzzle is 54 (puzzles with approximately 260 elements are considered children's). The sizes of the puzzles range from small (about 50 cm²) to very large (several m²). For example, the standard size of a 500-piece puzzle is 47x33 cm.
There are large-sized puzzles made from a small number of elements especially for young children. Children's puzzles most often depict cartoon characters, or stills from cartoons.
Puzzles with more than 260 elements are aimed more at an adult audience. Accordingly, they can depict landscapes, erotic and fantastic scenes. There are puzzles with advertising pictures. Very large puzzles (over 6 thousand elements) usually depict scenes from the Bible, paintings by famous artists, and ancient geographical maps. They take quite a lot of time to assemble.
In addition to the classic ones, there are three-dimensional (3D puzzles), “soft” (intended for children) and
Today, manufacturers of children's products provide us with a huge selection board games on a variety of topics - from simple “adventures” to quite complex educational products. Perhaps the most popular are puzzles, not only among children, but also among adults.
The history of creating puzzles begins not so long ago. The idea of assembling a picture from its fragments belongs to John Spilsbury (1739-1769). He lived in London and was engaged in manufacturing geographical maps. One day Spilsbury decided to cut the world map along the borders of states. The map fragments were not fastened together, but laid out on a wooden board. Spilsbury puzzles began to be used as a teaching aid in geography. Although today it can hardly be used for teaching, since since then modern maps Antarctica also appeared, which was discovered only in the 19th century, and Australia, little studied at that time. Thus, two of the six continents were missing.
As we have already said, the puzzle was laid out on a wooden board, but over time it was replaced with cardboard in order to reduce the cost of the puzzle.
Puzzles in the form we are familiar with appeared only in 1909, when the American company Parker Brothers began their industrial production. Over time, the puzzle conquered the whole world. Today on store shelves you can find puzzles with images on various topics, holographic puzzles and even 3D.
The word “puzzle” in Russian has a narrower definition than in English. Translated, “puzzle” means “riddle, task,” so the British understand by this word not only this, but also other types of puzzles. People who have made a significant contribution to the popularization of puzzles are awarded the international Spilsbury Prize. In addition, international competitions in puzzle solving are held.
When today some people (mostly, as a rule, the older generation) ask you to explain in a nutshell what a puzzle is, you won’t be able to answer clearly right away. On the one hand, yes, this is a mosaic that folds into a single image, although, often, the same abstraction can be put together from the proposed parts, only with the risk of spoiling the details. =) On the other hand, in most “classical” mosaics the elements still had an identical shape and differed only in color, but in modern puzzles the segments have different sizes and contours. You can, of course, as an example, recall the half-forgotten film “Moscow Evenings” by Todorovsky Jr., where the heroine of Alisa Brunovna Freindlich (according to the plot, a terribly successful writer) had fun at the dacha with a game little known in our latitudes: she tried to put together a picture in a bizarre way cut into many pieces. Here! An excellent definition: a puzzle is a kind of symbiosis of a mosaic and a puzzle, where a person (or a group of people) is asked to put together a picture that was figuratively cut earlier into many components.
As the ubiquitous Wikipedia says, puzzles contribute to the development logical thinking, memory, attention, imagination, etc. Again, don’t forget about fine motor skills hands (see raising children) is also an important factor. Just don’t think that playing puzzles is exclusively children’s fun: a very rare young child will be able to put together a picture consisting of several hundred elements. But, thanks to modern manufacturers, currently there are simply countless varieties of these puzzles, designed for all kinds of age categories, well, maybe nothing has been published just for infants yet.
Types of puzzles
Thus, a natural need arises to somehow classify the types of puzzles. So, there are flat puzzles designed to be assembled on a flat surface - on a table, for example, as well as three-dimensional puzzles - in the form of a ball, for example (many people really like to collect a globe or an apple), as well as in the form of a cube, pyramid, tube, etc. .p. Accordingly, puzzle pieces can be made from various materials: wood, plastic, 
made of foam rubber, metal, etc. And, of course, the most popular ones are made from cardboard.
You can also differentiate puzzles by degree of difficulty. The complexity of the puzzles is determined by the picture itself proposed for composing (for example, putting together just a clean, monochromatic sky is much more difficult than the periodic table, where all the chemical elements are arranged in a certain order), as well as the number of segments: putting together twenty pieces is easier than two thousand.
The word “puzzle” itself translated from English means a riddle, a rebus, a conundrum, as well as difficulty, confusion - this is used as a noun. But the verb “to puzzle” is translated as to puzzle, confuse, complicate, perplex. It is clear why domestic linguists did not come up with some Russian analogue of this very multifaceted term. Once upon a time, by the way, the great Nabokov tried to introduce the word “crossword” into the Russian language instead of the Western “crossword” - it didn’t take root.
History of puzzles
The Englishman John Spilsbury, a merchant of geographical maps, is officially considered the creator of puzzles. IN 1761
(!) year, John came up with the idea of gluing his product onto a thin wooden backing, cutting the resulting “sandwich” into many pieces and selling it as training manual to study geography. And indeed: the student took a separate piece of the map and composed it with others (you need to understand that a hand-cut image could not, by definition, contain elements absolutely identical in shape and size) - thus the knowledge of who with who borders, what flows where, etc. And for two and a half centuries now, many people have been devoting their leisure time to collecting different quantities small details of a single picture. And today all sorts of subjects are used as these very pictures. For children, everything is quite simple: cartoon and fairy tale characters, animals, cars, flowers, but adults do not limit themselves to the same geographical maps or mountain/sea landscapes. Classic picturesque works of art, panoramas of museums, fantastic sketches, erotic photographs, biblical scenes - absolutely anything that comes to mind is used to create puzzles these days. Many, by the way, do not burden themselves with the tangible task of collecting an entire home collection of puzzles, but download puzzles on the Internet (yes, there are computer puzzles!) and play so-called “online puzzles” on the computer.
A little history from your favorite online store GRENKA. Few people know when and how the first puzzles were born. This game came to us, yes, straight from England. You already know where they appeared, but how were they invented? Are you asking?
This happened in the 18th century, in one of the English schools. A geography teacher decided to make his lessons more interesting for children. He made a map of the world with his own hands from wood and sawed it along the borders of countries.
So what is a puzzle?
A puzzle is an educational puzzle. The task is to assemble a certain picture from many details. With the help of connecting clasps, the assembled puzzle elements cannot fall apart.
How are puzzles useful for your child?
In fact, a lot can be said and discussed on this topic. Your favorite online store grenka.ua will help you understand this difficult at first glance issue.
Let's start with logic. When a child tries to connect two puzzles together, he will have a question about why these two puzzles should be connected. He learns to match fragments by putting together a picture.
By collecting a picture one at a time, reproducing the picture that should be there, the child’s visual memory is trained. The more often he does this, the faster he will compare fragments of the picture, and this is very important.
Every time a child tries to find a missing fragment, glancing over the details, he himself, without realizing it, trains attentiveness. The more often he does this, the more he develops such a necessary skill as attentiveness.
Remember the moment when you first shared this game with your child. At first, the baby will find it difficult to even hold them in his hands, let alone collect them, and even correctly. When the baby tries to manipulate with his little hands, do not help him in this under any circumstances. After several not entirely successful attempts, he will be able to do it himself. Undoubtedly, such efforts train the baby’s fine motor skills.
Finally, probably the most important thing that adults sometimes lack is patience and perseverance. The puzzle cannot be put together hastily, without any thought. It takes time to put the picture together. Only the desire to do it yourself will help the child cope with the task. The child does not understand, but in this way he cultivates a valuable quality in himself, such as achieving his goal. And this is very good.
The online store Grenka.ua will help you choose the first puzzles for your baby.
It's best to start with puzzle books. Such books will also help your child learn to read. They have text on one side and a puzzle side on the other. This book also has a special frame where the child will collect his first puzzle.
Many people, out of ignorance, call or compare a puzzle to a mosaic, but this is not true, and you should not do this.
What's the difference?
Mosaic is primarily a type of applied art; its creation requires multi-colored elements of bizarre shapes and non-standard sizes. They can be made of various materials, for example, glass, stone, porcelain, ceramics and others. And already connected and fastened together in any sequence, which at first glance do not suit each other, these elements turn into a mosaic. Secondly, it was only thanks to imagination and fantasy that a person put everything together, without even imagining at the beginning of the process what the final result would be. A puzzle is an already existing image, divided into individual elements that are intended to be assembled during leisure time. Therefore, you should not compare it with the great works of mosaics.
What are puzzles and who invented them?
A puzzle is a puzzle game with a picture, photograph or image of anything, consisting of several pieces that have connecting elements on two or more sides. In the 18th century, one very inventive teacher, to teach his students, without any applied material, glued a geographical map onto a wooden board, and then sawed it into many irregularly shaped pieces. Now, probably, there is no person who does not know what a puzzle is, but then this idea was unusual and was liked by the teacher’s students and colleagues, and later went beyond the student classroom, becoming a wonderful pastime for the aristocracy and a new trend in art during As time passed, the puzzles changed. During the 20th century, the puzzle gained widespread popularity. The more people became interested in this game, the more complex and colorful the puzzles appeared.
What are they?
IN modern world a huge number of games and fun for every taste, intellect and budget, but the puzzle does not get old and keeps up with the times, winning new hearts. Now everyone has the opportunity to purchase a puzzle game depicting any painting, landscape, movie character, pet, or even family members. Various materials are used in the manufacture of puzzles - from the usual cardboard with a matte or glossy finish to three-dimensional figures made of plastic, plexiglass and ceramics. Colorful pictures can consist of four or six parts, or several thousand, with the smallest details drawn, which will delight true puzzle lovers. Volumetric puzzles are most often easy to assemble, but can vary in size and weight: from light, in the form of soft toys, to massive and heavy, in the form of ceramic decor. Modern technologies help in expanding the existing audience. Now you don’t have to think about what to do with the puzzle after assembly, or where to store it, because online puzzles with various levels of difficulty are available. Puzzles on a magnetic basis, which are perfectly attached to the outer surface of refrigerators, are extremely popular. They will decorate the interior of any home, remind you of wonderful moments in life or important dates, and will also become an indispensable assistant in the play and development of a child.
Collecting with your child
Puzzles for children are a godsend for any parent. A child may not be so diligent, calm, focused and enthusiastic in many cases, but collecting pieces into one big and interesting picture is one of them. You can put together puzzles with children from an early age; this will help develop the child’s motor skills and concentration, and help adults take a little break from everyday worries. This best way Spend some fun time with your child at home. You can start assembling puzzles with simple images of animals or objects, studying their names together, and most importantly, the elements will not be dangerous, since they are quite large in size. At an older age, puzzles develop the child’s intellect and his After collecting the picture on his own, the baby will want to save it, which can be done together by putting it in a frame under glass or gluing it on a sheet of cardboard.
How not to make a mistake when choosing?
The puzzle is interesting and original gift for children and adults. When choosing a puzzle game, you need to take into account the age and hobbies of the person for whom this gift is intended. For children younger age Puzzles with images of your favorite characters with no more than 35 elements are best suited. For older children, you can choose a game with a large number of pieces, but for true puzzle lovers, puzzles with 3000 or more elements are suitable. The classic one is the image of geographical maps or reproductions of famous paintings, but now panels with velor or luminous coating, as well as three-dimensional puzzles in the form of globes, famous buildings and soft toys, are gaining popularity. If you find it difficult to choose a gift, then remember the puzzle. This is a game you don't grow out of.