This series is designed to help people to understand modern technology, and become more confident in using computing devices. It is not designed to educate experts.
The author is involved in tutoring older students at SeniorNet, a New Zealand wide organisation. SeniorNet hopes that students will feel more confident in using their computing devices as a result of the learning opportunities offered. This series of articles shares that hope.
Many of us (perhaps most of us) have a Rubik’s cube sitting in a drawer where we tossed it in frustration at not being able to solve it. I imported mine from Aliexpress because I wanted a quality cube that turned smoothly. Some cheap cubes don’t turn smoothly, and this can make solving it just that bit harder.
Given that the record for solving this is just a few seconds, it can’t be that hard, surely? And the solvers are often PFY’s (**). Surely I’m better than that?
(**) Pimply Faced Youths
Let’s see if I can do it. I’ve looked at several YouTube solutions, and need one that I can follow. So if I can follow it, then I’m sure you can too!
Get your cube and put the white centre dot on top. Looking at the bottom will show a yellow centre dot, provided your cube is standard. Blue centre is opposite green centre and red centre is opposite orange centre. These are standard positions on all standard cubes.
I will use a YouTube lesson said to be the easiest way to learn to solve the cube, for anyone from 8 to 88. That includes my present age, so I’m good to go.
Here are the eight steps broken down. Each has a name to make it easier to remember them, and each name is a link to a YouTube video. I’ve added Aide-mémoires to remind you of the video instructions. Perhaps you should print this to give you a reminder after viewing the videos.
Hooray. It’s done. Now to do it a few more times so your muscle memory can learn these steps. You need to be able to reproduce this in front of your friends and relatives, so you can show off.
By breaking this down into eight steps I think we can all do this. No! I know we can do this. After all, with only 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 starting combinations, how hard can it be?
This comes out most times for me, but I find that every so often I either make a mistake, or there is an error in my starting order. In that case, I start over again, after having sworn at the cat for making me make an error. I can complete steps 1-4 without referring to the instructions. Hope you enjoy this and get your cube solved.