Kind of, although I don't think they do it deliberately.
Things like teaching logarithms without a slide rule.
> Puzzles like this aren't found in mainstream math education contexts. As you acknowledged in your post, they are only found in math competitions. What do you mean?
You're right. Let me try again.
Check out William Bricken's "Iconic Math" http://iconicmath.com/ or "Proofs without Words" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_without_words or the other 3Blue1Brown videos for that matter.
I think that most math seems hard to most people only because we are not creative in the ways that it is presented. We should use science to figure out how to present math so that people get it as fast as they can, in part so that we can find and concentrate on the actually hard math problems.
E.g. Alan Kay using Smalltalk to teach calculus to little kids in the context of modelling falling objects, to me kinda proves that it shouldn't take a whole semester to teach calculus to teenagers.
