Living Museum of Learning
A Childhood Memory Becomes a 121-Hole Universe
Situation
We had already been bringing old memories back to life through Golden Five and Golden Xiangqi.
Then Cindy mentioned another game from her childhood: Chinese Checkers.
A familiar game. A simple memory. The sort of thing that might come up in an ordinary conversation between two people who have shared a lifetime of experiences.
But Donald heard something more.
What if we brought this game back, too?
And so Golden Tiaoqi was born.
Turning Point
The moment a childhood memory became a new project, the questions began.
How do we represent a six-pointed board mathematically? How do we describe all 121 holes with coordinates? How do we generate the six triangular homes without manually entering every position?
The board became a coordinate system.
The six triangular arms became rotations of a single triangle.
And a familiar game began revealing its mathematical structure.
Emergence
We started implementing Golden Tiaoqi in Swift.
First came the geometry: a central hexagon containing 61 holes, surrounded by six triangular homes of 10 holes each. Then came piece ownership, legal adjacent moves, jumps, chained jumps, player turns, and victory detection.
Each step came with tests.
Green.
Then another step.
Green again.
Soon, we were drawing the board on an iPhone and iPad. Its slanted geometry makes the logical coordinates easy to read, connecting the abstract mathematics directly to the game we can see and play.
We weren't merely recreating a board from memory. We were discovering how to describe its structure precisely enough for a computer to understand it.
Learning
A childhood game can be more than entertainment. It can be a doorway into coordinate geometry, symmetry, sets, algorithms, state machines, and software testing.
But the first spark wasn't a programming assignment or a textbook.
It was a conversation with Cindy.
The source of the project was a family memory. The learning emerged as we explored what it would take to bring that memory back to life.
The Living Museum Connection
At the Living Museum of Learning, we preserve not only finished creations, but also the moments that give rise to them.
Golden Tiaoqi is a new digital game built around an old human memory.
Perhaps one day, another family will play it together and create a memory of their own.
And years later, that memory might become the beginning of something else.
One memory leads to a game. One game opens a universe of learning. 🌱