Balances

What is it?

A balancing game made of solid beech, consisting of a central seesaw with counterweights and four sticks for placing the pieces, along with 24 pieces of different weights, thicknesses and colours.

It has an evolutionary character so it begins as a sorting game, combining sticks and colours without a pattern, until it can be used to understand Newton’s “Law of Levers”, verifying how the pieces placed on the outer sticks weigh twice as much as those placed on the inner sticks.

Who is it for?

This material can be used from 12 months of age to 99 years. It offers different games with different levels of difficulty to adapt to each age range.

What does it develop?

With the different activities proposed, we work on the following areas:

– Fine motor skills.

– Colour discrimination.

– Attention.

– Counting.

– Sums and divisions.

– Mental calculation.

– Frustration tolerance.

Activities

The possible activities differ in relation to age or stage of maturity:

– From 12 to 36 months: The seesaw is kept fixed to the supports to reduce the difficulty. The game consists of placing the pieces of different colours on the sticks. The game can be free or colour-based.

– From 36 months to 6 years: The first game consists of reproducing the sequences of colours represented on the chips to check, by self-correcting, if the balance is maintained.

– From 8 years: The chips will be used to relate quantity to colour, applying the same system of self-correction. These chips are evolutionary in nature and their difficulty increases progressively. The values of the pieces are the following: red = 3, green = 2 and blue = 1. In this way, we can reproduce the same weight (number) with different sequences of chips. The difficulty increases when taking into account Newton’s Law, having to divide the amount by 2 when placing it on the middle stick, even if it is done intuitively.

– From 6 years old: the proposal consists of teams of up to 4 people adding or removing pieces in a collaborative or competitive way to prevent the seesaw from becoming unbalanced.

– From 8 years: it is a competition between two players / teams. The game starts by putting the supports on the seesaw and putting up the separation board, which prevents seeing the opponent’s construction. One of the teams will then create a free composition of pieces. When they are ready, the board will be removed and in a certain time the opposing team must make a composition that balances the seesaw. If, when the supports are removed, the composition is an exact copy of the opponent’s, this team will receive a point. If the composition is different but balanced, the team will earn two points. If the seesaw is unbalanced, the point will be awarded to the opposing team.

The game can be started with a 45 second time limit to carry out the construction and the time can then be decreased to give the game more difficulty and excitement.

(The set does not include a watch).

In the following video you can see how each of the proposed games works: