I’ve been working hard to create fun puzzles, quizzes, educational resources, and more for my upcoming online store. For a few months I was (mostly) able to follow my carefully laid plan: start with the very earliest skills for 3–4 year olds and work my way up from there. You can think of early language awareness, shapes and colors, early pencil control, etcetera.

Until I hit my first real snag. (Well, frankly, it was like the tenth snag, but this one was a bit bigger than the others, and the other mostly happened before I made the very first educational resource.)

I was halfway my work on shapes when I realized: “wait, I remember these shape puzzles existing, where you had to create animals and other common objects out of triangles? What were they called again? Shouldn’t I include those?”

A few hours later, I had rediscovered tangrams, pentominoes, pattern blocks and even the geoboard. All different ways to create “drawings” out of basic shapes/lines. All really great ways to practice shapes and spatial awareness, using fun and creative approaches. I had painstakingly collected all the different things you could make, sorting them by difficulty, trying to keep down material requirements but not forgetting any of the really obvious tangrams (that would appeal to kids).

And then I got stuck.

Because I asked myself the question: What am I doing?

This has all been done before! You can buy a good Tangram set for 10 bucks nearly everywhere. I’d mostly been copying the work others had done before me, only subconsciously adding some very minor flourishes myself. Why would I make this?

Sure, the pentomino puzzles are far more rare, and pattern blocks give more options for my own creative challenges, but that’s not enough. I had a folder full of existing work on these puzzles, and the plan was just to … manually make them again? Perhaps with a few different colors and fonts to fit my store branding?

It wasn’t strong enough. I felt absolutely no energy/motivation to start this work, and I had to just accept that and work on something else that day (and the next). All that time, my mind kept asking “What can I bring to the table? What is my unique selling point if I make this?”

Exploring this question taught me surprisingly many general lessons. Ones that I hope make all my later projects/products better (and easier to market). That’s why I wanted to write this article and explain it a bit.

The Easy Answer: get everything in one place

This is why most things get made, really.

I put in the work that day to research tangrams, collect the ones made before, put them together into a single file, etcetera. Consumers don’t want to do this. Someone looking to help their child explore shapes just wants to buy something (that’s finished and of consistent quality), and use that.

Okay, but that has also been done before. You can buy a “printable tangrams PDF” in many places online.

And so we get to the second part of this reasoning: consumers tend to buy products from the same place. Either because they know that one brand and stick to it, or because that’s the place they’re browsing anyways. If someone is used to visiting my store, then they will be far more likely to buy my tangram product. As opposed to leaving the store, searching for some other place, and buying that one.

Reason #1: I would really like to keep everything in one place. (Which also allows products to have a consistent look, theming and quality.)

I want my online store to be “complete”, in a sense. If there’s a gap that I can fill, I want to do so. Because it would mean that people can repeatedly visit the store, trust that I have what they need, and I can make their life easy by offering it all in one place.

As a consequence, this also allows offering it all in the same style and format. So anybody who is used to another product of mine, will more quickly understand what to do with this printable Tangram product. They will know what it likely contains and won’t contain. They will, hopefully, know that I set high quality and creative standards to everything I make.

This made me realize, for the first time, how much value this has. How much value there is to simply having things in one place. To simply putting in the hours to collect everything into one nice product, because consumers don’t want to do that—they want to pay a bit of money to not have to do it themselves.

I guess it’s a consequence of my general DIY mind-set, which I’ve had all my life. I have always wanted to learn things myself, make them myself, figure them out myself. The effort required for it isn’t a downside—it’s a major benefit! But I have come to realize most people don’t have this approach, or can’t afford to have it, which is why they’re fine with paying say 10 euros to get all the good Tangrams, in one style, in one PDF, with my seal of approval on it.

The Harder Answer: either be the best or be the only

This is a common saying that I forget too often. To succeed in a field you must either be the best (beating everyone else by raw skill/power/might) or the only (having value because you’re doing something that nobody else is doing).

Being the best is, obviously, only possible for a select few. Mostly large teams with lots of funds and whatnot. I simply can’t reach that and I’m also not really interested in doing so.

Instead, we can be the only. And so I ask myself: what twist can I put on this product that makes it unique?

In many of my older projects, this came naturally. The whole idea for many projects is that question that pops up and says “what if I made X, but we change Y?” Many ideas start with the unique twist that nobody has ever done before.

This time, it did not. Which is how I found a bit of a “process” to it.

• I researched existing work for a few hours. Not just to save useful images (of the Tangrams, of course), but also to see everything around it.
• I noted patterns and wrote them down. In this case,
  • Almost all of them use the exact same bright, very contrasting colors for the Tangram pieces. I don’t particularly like the colors in the first place, but they also started to look ugly and annoy me quite quickly.
  • They provide EITHER a mat (you place the pieces on the paper, slotting them in as it were) OR just tiny images of what you could make and you have to place the pieces in whatever empty space you find.
  • They give the answers at once: here’s the thing you want to make—look at the back for all the answers.
  • They all provide just a long list of the same puzzles. The difficulty (e.g. number of pieces used) is the same from start to finish, and so is the objective.
• Then I looked for ways to break those patterns! To do something new!
  • What if I use softer colors? More natural and magical, as fits my general theme?
  • What if I provide both mats (one paper per tangram, play on the paper) and a simple one page overview with all shapes in the entire product (which is far more efficient in terms of space and paper)
  • What if I provide answers at stages, but on the same page? (You can get a “hint” and see only a few of the pieces. If you still fail to figure it out, you might move on to the final solution.)
  • What if I clearly sort them based on difficulty?
  • What if I add some small exercises too? (For example, for older children, can you calculate the area of the Tangram pieces/creations you make?)
  • What if I reuse the same pieces/puzzles for other games?

All of these ideas seemed like strong additions to me. And something nobody else was really doing.

Yes, it’s a lot of extra work. What might have been 1 or 2 days of work, became nearly a week-long obsession with shape-based puzzles on my end. But I was able to do the work because there was a clear why. I knew the many unique improvements I was adding and the value I was putting into this product.

That final question might seem like “too much”, or like I’m trying to turn Tangrams into something they’re not. Why would you make a game with these pieces too? Why not keep it simple and streamlined—there’s a reason these puzzles have remained popular for many years!

Well, one reason is that uniqueness again. I am a game designer. I’m working towards an entire educational curriculum made of just games. And so it makes sense to make this a unique selling point. People know that, if they try my product, they will get some educational games too.

The other reason is simply that the ideas came naturally. I was thinking about shape games in general, and some strong ideas fell out that simply used the same pieces. Adding those games would simply mean adding a single page of illustrated rules (and perhaps a handful of extra material pieces). Which is little work for the amount of value and replayability you’d get out of it.

For example, I realized that playing on a mat, you’re “covering up” the mat as you go. Covering up/revealing spaces is a common mechanic in board games. So I thought: couldn’t you make a simple game that starts with the finished tangram, and has you slowly remove pieces to reveal what’s underneath? And then what you reveal can either be good or bad for you? This is a very simple but potent mechanic, so I really wanted to make it.

At the same time, it felt wasteful to just copy-paste the exact same Tangrams to a new product. Especially because this exact same game can ALSO be played with the Pentominoes, and the Pattern Blocks. It would mean creating three new products that are very, very similar to existing ones. So it felt more useful to put the game into the same product, as it only required minor tweaks.

As usual, such choices might actually be great from a standpoint of “make the most money”. If I can do work once, and turn it into 6 products to sell, that’s great, right? But I’m not working for profit or greed. I want to keep my store minimalist and streamlined, to keep things easy to find and not waste space with garbage. I want to provide real value if you decide to put 10 euros into nothing but a printable PDF. I don’t want to force people to wade through 30 very very similar lazily-combined products to find one thing that might be what they’re looking for.

I did end up splitting the Tangrams, Pentominoes and Pattern Blocks into three separate products. Combining them just made no sense, as they don’t actually share anything except for the vague notion of “fill a silhouette by placing the shapes”. The shapes are different, the possible silhouettes are different, the difficulty ramp is different, etcetera.

The Most Unlikely Answer: personal growth (or “easier future”)

Now I’d found some strong and sensible reasons to make this. And I had a plan of how to do it, and how to incorporate all these improvements from the start (which is far more efficient than having to fix everything later, of course).

But something still nagged me. In the days that I thought about this, I struggled to find something else to make. I really didn’t want to “continue”. I was mostly unable to tell myself “drop the shapes for a bit, move to the next part of the curriculum” (which would be your first numbers, 1–5). I couldn’t do it.

And then I realized why.

The idea of a learning process, of a curriculum, is that later skills build on earlier ones. These resources on shapes are mostly necessary to give young children their first intuition for logic and mathematics. Shapes are an easy and immediate way to understand something like counting corners to identify a shape, or completing patterns of shapes, which is a big step towards your first numbers/counting.

I couldn’t continue until I had finished this earlier part! I didn’t want to start a later product until I had completely explored, worked on, and finished the step that came before it. Because it would mean rushing into that later product with only half the knowledge and experience. It would mean creating that later product without actually knowing for sure what earlier products had (or hadn’t) taught.

This convinced me to work on the “Tangram Trilogy” (as I came to call this) right now. Instead of putting it off or thinking even longer about this question of why. I had to make this, even if it sucked and ended up very similar to what’s been done before, so that I could finish this step on the educational path before taking the next one.

Everything combined, these three products took me a week of full-time work. More than I wanted. But they’re very solid, very valuable, and—as this article shows—it instantly improved me plans for what came after.

Practice over Theory, Always

This article, thus far, has been my thought process and “theoretical” musings about what to do. I know from experience that reality always turns out at least slightly different. And it’s reality that matters more, of course. And so I was prepared for this plan to adapt and change slightly as I went.

For example, I wanted to have a nice “difficulty curve”. All other Tangram resources I found use all the puzzles. The very first puzzle you try is basically the same difficulty as the final one in the book. I don’t like that, so I wanted to start with just 3 shapes and work our way up from there.

Unfortunately, it’s just really hard to make varying and interesting shapes from just 3 or 4 Tangram pieces. And so I could only do a handful of them before I had to move to 5 pieces.

It also meant that, by the time we reached the full 7-piece puzzles (for which I had many references and existing images), we were already on some 30 puzzles. I knew my computer would struggle to even open/edit/export the file anymore if I added all the 7-piece puzzles I had planned too, so I had to cut that a bit short.

In practice, the upper limit for my computer was 55 puzzles, and one page of exercises/homework questions about the shapes and such. Which meant the game aspect had to be moved to a separate file.

And if you do that, the strangest thing usually happens to our brains. The moment we create a new file/folder/name for some part of the project, it grows. I had planned to just say “these are the rules, these are some extra pieces, now use the other PDF as the base boards to play on”. Instead, this “Tangram Games” package became a set of 6 pretty good Tangram-inspired games if I may say so myself.

Good enough, large enough, and distinct enough to make it its own product anyway. It just didn’t make sense to bundle it, just as it didn’t make sense to create one humongous PDF that would really do two or three different things.

So yes, as expected, 1 day of making Tangrams turned into 4 days of making a whole lot more around the topic. But I dare say I had one of my best educational game ideas ever because of this, which I will soon apply to other topics.

This split had two additional benefits.

• This new product could now be clearly (and correctly) classified in the “Games” category, instead of the “Puzzles”. I increasingly believe it’s very important to keep this separation strict, as it makes the webshop so much more easily usable and understandable to anyone looking for something specific.
• I now had a bit of space left over to add more tangrams! Many of the ones I couldn’t do in the original package, I could now add here. Which brought the total number of traditional (7-piece) Tangram puzzles you can get from the store and play with the same pieces to nearly 100.

I initially made the Tangram pieces for the games a bit smaller (8cm vs 10cm), because this would save a lot of pages. But I really wanted to be able to say “you can play these games with Tricksy Tangrams puzzles too!” I wanted those two resources to still be connected and usable together. I also did not want to confuse people or have them buy multiple Tangram sets in different sizes :p So I ended up standardizing all the sizes to the same thing anyway, even if it added some more pages to the material (because fewer things could fit together on one page).

Another example of “practice over theory” can be seen in my game that had the working title “fit-tangram-pieces-inside-containers”. The game is simple: you draw a random “container” tile (which has a clear shape/outline) and then try to fit as many shapes as possible within that container. Without overlap or sticking through the edges, of course.

When I made the containers, however, I realized they needed to be huge if I ever wanted to fit the 2 largest Tangram triangles in there. (And still allow a few other shapes in there too.) Now, one might be tempted to be annoyed by this. To try and overcome this obstacle, such as by resizing all containers to be huge or even spread across multiple pages.

But I like to just take what constraints reality gives me and work with that. Usually, it works out. In this case, looking at different versions of the rules, I realized it was indeed far easier to make the base game about fitting as many shapes as possible—as opposed to, say, the largest triangles being worth 2 points and the others only 1. Or some other more complicated scoring system that took the specific shapes into account.

Well … if we just say exclude the largest triangles (just don’t play with them), we have now improved the game and solved all issues, while keeping material small and light. It’s a rule I never even considered beforehand—excluding specific shapes for a specific game—but it revealed itself in practice and, as expected, works much better in practice.

Tessella Comes Along

By now, I had put so much effort into the Tangrams and Pentominoes that they had become massive products with huge value. A highlight of the early work for the webshop, and certainly worth promoting and expanding later. That’s why I decided to put them into a sub project, which will also (hopefully) contain common puzzles like Pattern Blocks and the Geoboard in the future. Just to give it a nice name people can click on/memorize, and to keep these related projects together.

After brainstorming some wildly different names, I settled on Tessella’s Toolbox. Because the one overarching theme in all these puzzles is “tessellation”: the act of dividing some larger shape/image/form into smaller pieces.

So far, I had already written a few fairy tales (for “Explorers”) about topics too. Each time, I would invent one or two fun characters that kids could latch onto, usually with some weird magical skill that helped understand the topic at hand. And so … Tessella became the ideal name for one such character too! She ended up in the stories about shapes. She obviously had a magical toolbox now, the name of the project pretty much required it.

And that’s how, over time, I both overcame my hesitation + made some solid products, as well as found a way to tie it all together and introduce a creative fun character into my stories. Because yes, that’s how creativity works ;) Tessella was mostly chosen because it just sounded right. I had already finished these products and only came up with the name later. And I only happened to make the connection with my fairy tales/stories because I had planned to start writing The Shapesquare Stories the next morning.

Conclusion

So there you have it. My considerations about why to make the things you make. In this case,

• Don’t underestimate how many people want to spend money to get something now (in one place, accessible, easy to find, completely finished), instead of doing even a little bit of work themselves. In a way, that’s what money represents at its core. You can buy someone else’s time and effort that they put into something, so you don’t have to do it yourself. As such, simply making something that already exists but in your style, on your webshop, together with your other work is already valuable on its own.
• Then, research what has been done before, notice patterns, and actively try to break those patterns. Actively pick the options that nobody seems to be doing, or at least explore them. (There can be, of course, a very good reason why people don’t make that or do it in that way.)
• As soon as you have a semblance of a plan, just start making it. Because reality always has something to say about it, and in practice you’ll need to change many details anyway (and learn the most about what actually does or does not work).
• And finally, in my case, I often see work as “practice” or “exploration”. Even if it doesn’t become very good or valuable on its own, at least you made something, learned from it, and can now take the next step with more confidence. Slotting in these shape puzzles on the online store just made the curriculum look so much nicer and more “complete”.

I hope this helps someone out there to realize why to make something, or to change their idea into something that has a clearer why. For most people, it’s about doing something new and unique and exciting, as we simply can’t all be the best, or the biggest website, or the richest.

Until next time,

Tiamo