Guide to teaching puzzle-based learning (Q2250569)

This is an excellent book on developing critical thinking skills and mental stamina, essential for solving real-world problems. Although many educators are interested in teaching ``thinking skills'' rather than ``teaching knowledge'', the fact is that too little time is allocated to think about problems and solve them. Most students never learn how to think about solving problems. Usually they just trained to apply particular formulae to a problem and calculate results. The authors use puzzle-based learning (pbl) as a foundational approach to develop thinking skills, mental stamina and perseverance at solving problems. The pbl approach aims to encourage students to think about how to frame and solve descriptive-type (unstructured) problems, also to motivate students, and to increase their mathematical awareness by discussing a variety puzzles and their solution strategies. Puzzles can help to shift the curricular emphasis from remembering to reasoning and provide an opportunity to discuss about different techniques, disciplines or application areas. The book is a guide for teaching pbl. The book is organized in three parts. Part I provides information on the pbl approach, discusses a variety of class activities, and assignment settings. Part II concentrates on problem solving strategies: reasoning backwards, simplify, iterate, increment, etc. Each chapter that illustrates a solving strategy is kept in the same format -- presents short introduction and 5 or 6 problems that illustrate the strategy, step-by-step guidance through a classroom situation. Part III contains many puzzles organized into collections and sets, starting with a collection of puzzles that require probabilistic reasoning and continue with logic and geometry puzzles. The book should be interesting to many instructors (on all levels) who have experimented or plan to experiment with the pbl approach. This approach can be applied in universities, high schools, professional organizations and companies.