Steiner system

Okay kiddo, have you ever played with building blocks? A Steiner system is kind of like building with blocks but with more rules.

So imagine you have a bunch of different colored blocks and you want to pick some of them to build a structure with. A Steiner system makes it so you pick certain blocks in a specific way.

First, you have to pick a certain number of blocks to build with, let's say 7. Then you pick a certain number of colors to use, let's say 3.

Here's where it gets a little more complicated. You have to pick the 7 blocks in such a way that every group of 3 blocks has all 3 of the colors in it. So if you pick 3 green blocks, 2 blue blocks, and 2 red blocks, you need to make sure that every group of 3 blocks has one green, one blue, and one red block.

This might sound confusing, but it's actually a useful concept for some mathematical and scientific things. It's kind of like a puzzle that we try to solve by picking the right combination of blocks.