Guide to Teaching Puzzle-based Learning

by Edwin F. Meyer III, Nickolas Falkner, Raja Sooriamurthi, Zbigniew Michalewicz

Overview

This book provides insights drawn from the authors’ extensive experience in teaching Puzzle-based Learning. Practical advice is provided for teachers and lecturers evaluating a range of different formats for varying class sizes. Features: suggests numerous entertaining puzzles designed to motivate students to think about framing and solving unstructured problems; discusses models for student engagement, setting up puzzle clubs, hosting a puzzle competition, and warm-up activities; presents an overview of effective teaching approaches used in Puzzle-based Learning, covering a variety of class activities, assignment settings and assessment strategies; examines the issues involved in framing a problem and reviews a range of problem-solving strategies; contains tips for teachers and notes on common student pitfalls throughout the text; provides a collection of puzzle sets for use during a Puzzle-based Learning event, including puzzles that require probabilistic reasoning, and logic and geometry puzzles.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781447164760
Publisher:	Springer-Verlag New York, LLC
Publication date:	07/23/2014
Series:	Undergraduate Topics in Computer Science
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Dr. Edwin F. Meyer is an Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Baldwin Wallace University, Berea, OH, USA.

Dr. Nickolas Falkner is a Senior Lecturer and Associate Dean of Information Technology in the School of Computer Science at the University of Adelaide, Australia.

Dr. Raja Sooriamurthi is an Associate Teaching Professor in the Information Systems Program at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA.

Dr. Zbigniew Michalewicz is an Emeritus Professor of the School of Computer Science at the University of Adelaide, Australia. He also holds Professor positions at the Institute of Computer Science, Polish Academy of Sciences and at the Polish-Japanese Institute of Information Technology.

Table of Contents

Part I: Motivation and Teaching.- Motivation.- Getting Started.- Icebreakers.- Effective Teaching Approaches.- Part II: Tools, Tips and Strategies.- Understand the Problem.- Reasoning: Logic and Reasoning Backwards.- Pattern Recognition.- Enumerate and Eliminate.- Simplify!.- Perform a Gedanken: “What If?” and “So What?”.- Simulation and Optimization.- Part III: Challenges.- Probabilistic Reasoning.- Logical Reasoning.- Geometric Reasoning.- Grand Challenges.- Summary.- List of Puzzles.

Editorial Reviews

From the book reviews:

“The book’s approach is to present many problems, and for each one, discuss how to present it to students and how to help them learn in the course of working on it. … this book does a very nice job of bringing together an impressive collection of puzzles and presenting them to teachers in a manner that supports their use in an undergraduate classroom.” (S. L. Tanimoto, Computing Reviews, November, 2014)

From the Publisher