by Caroline , Eric , and EmilyAbstract
Alexandria, Virginia
Introduction
Almost everyone has played with stacking ring toys
at one time or another. Most households with small children have them,
and
they are simple yet fun playthings for babies, children, and adults.
Many
of them have five rings of different colors (in our case blue, green,
yellow,
orange, and red) and often the largest ring is blue and the smallest
red
(this is true for our toy).
Caroline and Eric are PhD scientists, Emily is an
11-month-old baby, and the three of us would like to share with you
some things we learned by playing with this neat toy.
What is the toy like?
Our toy is a yellow tower with five rings: blue,
green, yellow, orange, and red. The rings are different sizes and the
tower is
tapered so that the only way you can fit all the rings on the tower is
to
put the biggest one on the bottom and so on up to the smallest one on
top.
This puts the rings in rainbow order with blue at the bottom, then
green,
yellow, and orange, and finally red on top. You can see the stacking
rings
toy in the picture below.
Caroline and Eric play with the toy
Caroline and Eric played with the toy for a while,
and always ended up leaving the rings stacked in rainbow order with
blue at
the bottom and red at the top. We've written this order in the table
below.
Emily plays with the toy
Emily took all the rings off, and then put them back
on in different orders. She was happy with all the different
arrangements she found. We've written some examples in the table. She
found that she could put a ring on top of the top ring and it would be
pretty stable since the tower pokes its head a little above the top of
the red ring. This is the
"Level 6" listed below.
Table: Different ring orders
Caroline Emily put the rings in all these ways
& Eric's a b c d e f
order
Level 6 yellow green red green orange red
Level 5 red orange red green red red yellow
Level 4 orange orange orange orange
Level 3 yellow blue yellow yellow
Level 2 green green green green
Level 1 blue blue blue
What we learned
Caroline and Eric always found the same ring order,
but Emily had a lot of fun with all sorts of different arrangements.
Maybe
Caroline and Eric were too quick put the rings in the order they knew
was
right. Do we know that their arrangement is "better" than any of
Emily's
arrangements? Perhaps adults shouldn't jump to conclusions so quickly.
Conclusions
We had a good time playing with the toy and Caroline
and Eric learned that their preconceived ideas are not necessarily
true.
You can also read the scientific version of this report.