Math Goggles #3 – Ch-ch-chain… of Attributes

Have you ever played a rhyming game? If not, join me for this week’s Math Goggles challenge. If you are new to Math Goggles and not sure what to do and why do it, check out this page first.

The inspiration for this week’s game comes from Malke Rosenfeld who sent me the I Spy in Common board game. The game has lots of tiles with seemingly unrelated pictures on them. That is, unrelated, until you start thinking creatively and finding common attributes on the different tiles.

We are going to play a grown-up version of this terrific game and we won’t need game tiles either. Here’s how – look around the room and choose any object. Now, look around some more and choose another object that shares at least one common attribute with the first object. Next, look for object #3 that has something in common with the object #2. And so on. How many objects can you chain together? For an extra challenge, can you loop back to the object you started with without repeating the attributes?

Here’s what my living room ch-ch-chain looks like:

My phone has lots of buttons and so does my…

… which is also rectangular in shape, just like…

… the bricks on my fireplace which, as you can see, are laid in a very simple pattern that reminds me of…

… this old wooden typeset drawer which is on the wall next to the fireplace and opposite…

this wooden bowl. This is the first non-rectangular object in my chain, so I’m going to add my…

… this round chair that sits next to it. The chair is made of woven rattan…

… which is different from the bamboo used in the blinds except that they are also woven. And you see this thin cord for pulling the blinds up? It brings me back to…

… my laptop and all the cords sticking out of it. And guess what? Since my ThinkPad is black, it shares that in common with… drum roll…

… my phone! (both the buttons and the plastic back)

Ok, so maybe my pictures aren’t all that inspiring (naturally, I blame it on my cheap point-and-shoot camera). In which case, check out the Rhyming Pics project archives (unfortunately, the project is no longer active) for some beautiful pictures. Can you follow the chains and guess the shared attributes in those images?

If you play this game and post it to your blog, Flickr!, Facebook, etc, let me know in the comments.