Calling all parents, grandparents, teachers, and school Principals. Here is a series of workbooks for all seasons and all reasons. Your significant child, grandchild, or student colors both inside and outside the outlines of both letters and digits. The sooner the better that he/she learns to think with his/her hands as well as their brain. And it is never too late to begin or resume the learning process. Mastering any skill requires a minimum of 10,000 repetitions. There are no shortcuts in life. Drill, baby, drill. Oh, and these are not just any letters and numbers stamped at random on the pages within. The visual schema has a deep alphanumerical underpinning in the branch of mathematics known as number theory. Yea there is some serious, subtle math going on - which furthermore engages both halves of the brain, and does so simultaneously. It all starts with 117 different, four-letter word squares - one of them per two-page spread of the workbook. Four sanitized words across and four more of the same down. A total of sixteen letters in all per 4x4 grid. The respective pages on the left of each spread have a larger font for coloring during an initial pass through the workbook, while them on the right of each spread have a smaller font for coloring during a subsequent pass. That they are never sixteen different letters is the first thing the budding mathematician notices. Here is the algorithm. Assign the digit '1' to the first letter that appears more than once in the word square. Assign the digit '2' to the second other letter that appears more than once in the word square. So on. Even in the most extreme case only the digits from '1' to '8' will be assigned. If there are any other letters left then we know that they individually are not repeated. Assign the digit '0' to each of such solitaires. So now we have encoded a word square composed of the letters of the alphabet into the corresponding substitution cipher with the added twist that the latter is composed of the numerical digits. Notice that a 3x3 grid has nine cells, that nine is the sum of eight and one, and that we conveniently have eight words and a 4x4 cipher per word square. As you see on the front cover, this is fine fodder for a revealing representation of the original word square.
About the Author: Francis Gurtowski retired from his position as a software developer at International Business Machines Corporation. The ancient coder and nouvelle artist was born and raised in Passaic, New Jersey, has a masters degree from Pratt Institute, and has cherry-picked courses in Manhattan at the School of Visual Arts and the Art Students League.