How to Solve Rubik’s Cube with your kids

“R U, R U crazy” said my wife to me, the other day.

“R U R U” were the sounds that we all kept hearing all this weekend at our house. Every one was pacing down the floor as we keep avoiding to crash into each other, while saying “R U R U”

Some of us were audibly loud, while the others were doing it in their head. If you are wondering what I am talking about, it’s about solving the Rubik’s Cube. I had recently written about the fact that our household is trying our hands at new things every week, as many of you have. My wife keeps coming up with new ideas every week, whether it was learning to count upto 20 in various languages when washing hands, or practicing tennis strokes in the garage (somehow) OR, like this week, Rubik’s cube.

Going back to “R U R U”, you will soon see that we used the beginner’s method to solve the Rubik’s cube. This method uses a lot of Right face turns (called R) and Upper face turns (called U) etc. When we needed to make the following movements (Right Upper Right Upper), we would say “R U R U” and so on on. Hence, the title.

Saying it out loud actually helped us remember those steps. So, we suggest that you do a lot of “R U R U” as well. It gets funny, and somehow addictive.

Back to the story about learning the solve the Beginner’s way.

Being a geek myself, when I saw that Rubik’s cube was on the list of things to try this week, I got excited about it and starting watching some YouTube videos that tried to explain the concepts to us.

Unfortunately, most of the videos we found online were trying too hard to keep the length of their videos rather short. The downside was that that sometimes, a key concept was not explained in detail, or assumed. The issue in that case is if you are trying to do this with elementary school kids (like mine), it can get frustrating.

But hey, we got time on our hands and after about 2 days of trying our hands at it, we are all Rubik’s Cube solvers.

Wifey, our 5th and 3rd grade daughters and myself have all learnt to do it. We used the beginner’s method to do this and we don’t need any notes to do it anymore. It’s all in our heads. And, we are going to make it easy for you

Kids are enjoying learning more and helping put more online resources to help other kids. So, we also invested the time in making detailed notes and steps to show you the steps so you can learn it easily.

Here are the series of videos you can watch and join us in the Rubik’s Cube Challenge. All you need is a cube, patience and practice. Hope these videos and notes help. Enjoy!!! Happy Cubing!!!

Understanding the Basics
Step 1: Daisy At Top
Step 2: Flower on Bottom
Step 3: Bottom Corners
Step 4: Edge Pieces on Middle Row
Step 5: Flower on Top
Step 6: Align Edge pieces to the Face Color
Step 7: Corner Colors in Place
Step 8: Solve the Top Face

Enjoy and Happy Cubing.

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Our Data+Kids project continues to move into its 5th week as we learn how to use Tableau to learn about Data

My next post will be about “What does an Algorithm mean to a non techie person?”

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Chapter 6: Calculated fields with Tableau

It’s not always that your data EXACTLY the way you need. Infact, many a times, you don’t have much of the data in your dataset

However, often, what you are looking for is available in your dataset in a different form. And, that’s when we can use calculated fields to build new ways of looking at our data. These calculated fields are new blocks from existing blocks of information we already have. We discussed that in our next session with the olympics data

As a quick reminder, here is the link to our main project page and don’t forget to sign-up if you would like to get emails when we publish another blog

Chapter 5: Filters with Tableau

In order to keep interest in a topic, some changes are required. We realized that “at home” that using the same data that we have been using so far for our “Data+Kids” project isn’t quite working so well. So, we moved over to Olympics data to see what we can find about that

In this chapter, we mostly covered “Tableau Filters” and some concepts like understanding the various fields in your data set and how they could be related

As a quick reminder, here is the link to our main project page and don’t forget to sign-up if you would like to get emails when we publish another blog

Chapter 4: Circle Views

The data+kids project lives on as does the “Stay at Home” order. Today, we looked at few ways we can create “Circle Views” along with a few other tips&tricks along the way. Hope you enjoy this one, especially, the first minute 😉

As a quick reminder, here is the link to our main project page and don’t forget to sign-up if you would like to get emails when we publish another blog