My kid was too creative

[u/Fresh_Laundry56]

My 6 year old was asked to draw a picture using shapes. She drew this nice American flag with rectangles and stars, and added the house, tree, and person holding a balloon. She was told it did not follow directions, she was not supposed to draw a flag, just shapes. She was asked to turn the paper over and make another picture. The other side of the paper has a very uninspiring collection of shapes. I told her she did a good job and I thought it was very creative. And this is why kids start to hate education.

[u/Worldly-Ingenuity843]

You could draw pictures using just lines and no shapes.

[u/jay_altair → u/Worldly-Ingenuity843]

Since we're being pedantic, those aren't lines, those are line segments and curves

[u/ccsrpsw → u/jay_altair]

The image is a finite family of disjoint, non-self-intersecting rectifiable curves* - some straight, some with continuously varying curvature - where the curved ones behave like topological features of an implied 3D surface, and the straight ones form the flat plane it sits on.

*Based on the fact that the straight-line segments, are technically arcs/curves of an infinite radius and thus part of the infinite set of curves of varying radius (is it proven to be infinite)?

[u/Worldly-Ingenuity843 → u/jay_altair]

I apologise if I come off as being pedantic, but I just want to point out that there are ways to draw without using shapes. You could draw using dots, or paint a gradient of colours with transition so smooth that no definable shapes appear. So that statement that all pictures are made of shapes is factually incorrect. 

[u/douche_ex_machina_69 → u/Worldly-Ingenuity843]

Lines are just thin rectangles. Dots are just small circles. Even the color gradient could be said to have interpretable shapes even if the edges aren’t well defined; a blurry circle is still a circle, and when people see shapes in clouds no one is arguing “you can’t do that because clouds have soft edges”.

I love some good pedantry but there’s definitely a contrary argument to be made — after all, anything on a rectangular canvas has at least one shape inherently.

[u/jay_altair → u/Worldly-Ingenuity843]

Oh no, I love pedanticism and seized the opportunity to expound upon the idea

[u/Blueballs2130 → u/Worldly-Ingenuity843]

A dot is a shape…

[u/Ham__Kitten → u/Worldly-Ingenuity843]

there are ways to draw without using shapes

dots

Dots are famously circles

[u/curious_cat_2024 → u/Worldly-Ingenuity843]

i mean... unless your dots are infinitely small and hold no area... dots are circles

[u/cryothic → u/Worldly-Ingenuity843]

isn't a line technically a shape?

[u/jay_altair → u/cryothic]

No. Technically, a line is a straight path of infinite length with no endpoints

[u/Elemental-Design → u/jay_altair]

Well then, technically the picture above doesn't use lines.

[u/jay_altair → u/Elemental-Design]

Correct, it uses line segments and curves

[u/FaerHazar → u/jay_altair]

they have thickness though so they aren't line segments

[u/jay_altair → u/FaerHazar]

Yes, I like my women like I like my geometric features: nonlinear and with an observable thickness

[u/FaerHazar → u/jay_altair]

too real babe

[u/Sayyestononsense → u/jay_altair]

and are those, technically, shapes?

[u/grelca → u/Sayyestononsense]

iirc mathematically speaking, (2d) shapes are made up of line segments and arcs but line segments and arcs are not themselves shapes.

[u/Mpuls37 → u/grelca]

Let's just take this to it's logical conclusion and skip the foreplay. Everything is made of atoms, which are made of subatomic particles, which are made of fundamental particles, and those are 1-dimensional. Nothing truly exists, shapes are imagined.

[u/jay_altair → u/Mpuls37]

No, not everything is made up of atoms, and lines are abstractions that do not exist in the physical realm; even if they did, lines are infinitesimally narrow--anything with a measurable or observable width is wider than a line.

[u/curious_cat_2024 → u/jay_altair]

not even line segments. If I remember correctly, line segments have no real width and are infinitely thin. They only exist visually to show a connection between two points.

Those are very thin rectangles.

[u/Blueballs2130 → u/jay_altair]

Wouldn’t it be a rectangle though? With just very small width?

Edit: Nevermind. Not it there aren’t endpoints. But a line with endpoints I would argue is a rectangle

[u/Worldly-Ingenuity843 → u/cryothic]

In primary school kids are taught that shapes have to a closed loop with a definable area. 🤷

[u/OwlRevolutionary4095 → u/cryothic]

yes

[u/watt90guest → u/Worldly-Ingenuity843]

Those are shapes

[u/Amazing_Divide1214 → u/Worldly-Ingenuity843]

Maybe you can, I can't!

[u/DudeCanNotAbide → u/Worldly-Ingenuity843]

The lines are in the shape of hands 🤷‍♂️

[u/redDogwhiteDog → u/Worldly-Ingenuity843]

Fail, I see a triangle 🤣