Falkner Nickolas - Guide to Teaching Puzzle-based Learning

In designing a new course, instructors have three concerns: (1) What knowledge and skills should students learn? (2) How can I facilitate their learning? (3) How do I determine how well they have learned via formative and summative feedback? These three concerns are viewed under the umbrella that pedagogy is all about learning and not teaching. As with the role puzzles play in Puzzle-based Learning, teaching per se is just a means to the end of effective learning.

Chapter sets the tone for the rest of the book building upon the introduction. It provides further motivation for teachers as to why they should consider teaching a course on puzzle-based learning. From the interview process of companies to current research on System 1 and System 2 thinking, we discuss our perspective of the continuum of Project-based, Problem-based, and Puzzle-based Learning.

At workshops on education-themed conferences, we often get the question How can I start teaching Puzzle-based Learning at my university? Chapter suggests various possibilities to get started. A crucial component is communicating the joy and value of Puzzle-based Learning. We conclude with a discussion of running a puzzle contest which is a fun activity both for organizers and participants.

Perhaps more than any other course, Puzzle-based Learning makes the instructor and students feel vulnerable as they have to expose not just their final answers but more importantly their step-by-step reasoning. It is very important to establish a supportive classroom environment of constructive critique and mutual exploration.

Chapter discusses various icebreakers we have used in our classes to infuse a sense of excitement of things to come and to establish an ambience of cognitive camaraderie.

From elementary school to senior citizens, from 15-people seminars to 300-people lectures, from one-hour talks to full-semester courses, we have, over the past several years, successfully taught puzzle-based learning in a range of educational settings. Chapter shares our collective experience in teaching Puzzle-based Learning. Whereas each teacher will have their own pedagogical principles and style, we share what we have used in our own classes to form a basis that could be molded to suit ones own academic environment.

Springer-Verlag London 2014

Edwin F. Meyer III 1, Nickolas Falkner 2, Raja Sooriamurthi 3 and Zbigniew Michalewicz 2

If you want to build a ship, dont drum up people to collect wood and dont assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea .

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Consider the following puzzles. Some of the solutions to these are discussed in detail in further chapters. For now, just ponder the puzzles themselves.

What is common to all of the above? Apart from being fun to ponder, solutions to these puzzles exemplify several problem-solving heuristics. What general problem-solving strategies can we learn from the way we solve these puzzles? There are two main reasons to incorporate Puzzle-based Learning in schools curricula:

Puzzle-based Learning is rapidly becoming a bigger and bigger part of the curriculum as there is no guarantee that a traditional education will provide students with enough practice and experience to develop problem-solving skills. The rapidly changing face of employment and technology means that the problems that we train people to solve today are probably not the problems that they will be solving in ten years. When our current education system tends to favor highly focused learning of rigid approaches to predictable problem sets, there is no guarantee that our students will be flexible enough and resilient enough to cope with open-ended problems with no guaranteed solution.

William Poundstone in chronicling the interview process at Silicon Valley and other technology companies highlights the same: Why use logic puzzles, riddles, and impossible questions? The goal of Microsoft s interviews is to assess a general problem-solving ability rather than a specific competency. At Microsoft, and now at many other companies, it is believed that there are parallels between the reasoning used to solve puzzles and the thought processes involved in solving the real problems of innovation and a changing marketplace. [] When technology is changing beneath your feet daily, there is not much point in hiring for a specific, soon-to-be-obsolete set of skills. You have to try to hire for general problem-solving capacity, however difficult that may be. [] Both the solver of a puzzle and a technical innovator must be able to identify essential elements in a situation that is initially ill-defined. It is rarely clear what type of reasoning is required or what the precise limits of the problem are. The solver must nonetheless persist until it is possible to bring the analysis to a timely and successful conclusion.