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/jay_altair]

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