Instructors traditionally lecture on new content before providing practice problems, but learning is often superficial. Exploratory learning before instruction deepens conceptual understanding by giving students a novel activity to explore before direct instruction. We examined how increasing the salience of contrasting cases in exploration versus…

To provide practice and assessment of computational thinking, we need specific problems students can solve. There are many such problems, but they are hard to find. Learning environments and assessments often use only specific types of problems and thus do not cover computational thinking in its whole scope. We provide an extensive catalog of…

Many gifted students fail to be diagnosed, preventing them from receiving an education that is adapted to their characteristics, with activities that challenge their minds. Mathematics is one of the subjects in which they can demonstrate talent, where they often exhibit high skills in solving problems, handling numbers and performing spatial…

In this article, the authors describe an algebra 2 class activity, called the Exponent Maze, that had students practice many mathematics problems, display their creativity, and work together collaboratively by creating their own mazes. The authors discuss how they introduced the activity, what the students created, and how creating mazes can be…

Design thinking has become an important process in many fields to encourage innovation toward problem solving skills in various fields. In the field of education, design thinking has been incorporated into curriculums as it contributes both to higher order thinking skills and to the learning process with its flexible and dynamic nature. However,…

This article aims to implement an engineering design-based STEM activity for young children and evaluate the implementation process of the activity, along with providing some revision ideas. The activity was held as a 90-minute weekend workshop with the participation of six children aged four to seven. Data were collected through digital…

In this article, the author presents a teaching prompt--Write-it-Out--to instruct readers who seemingly guess at words with no or limited use of grapheme-phonemic correspondences to recontextualize word-solving into writing. Through the nature of this prompt, slowing down the pace of solving words on the run with writing also reciprocally builds…

Problem-solving is, by nature, a creative process which, by teaching through the implementation of research and discovery activities, allows students to create their knowledge, revise it and link it to broader systems. The aim of the research was to describe and analyse the process of solving biological problems through activities that are…

Hackathon has been growing and taking various industries by storm thanks to its flexibility and ability to fit into them. It has been proven successful and helpful in solving different IT and non-IT challenges. They also serve as an intriguing educational and networking tool, encouraging people to pursue innovative studies and activities. However,…

Background: The complexity and diversity of problems and concepts in different engineering subjects represent a great challenge for students. Traditional approaches to teaching statics are ineffective in helping some students overcome the learning barriers that underlie learning statics and developing problem-solving skills. Purpose: This article…

The human capacity for technological innovation and creative problem-solving far surpasses that of any species but develops quite late. Prior work has typically presented children with problems requiring a single solution, a limited number of resources, and a limited amount of time. Such tasks do not allow children to utilize one of their…

Contribution: This article defines "curricular hackathons" and describes the features, challenges, and opportunities of adopting the hackathon format into engineering curricula. It is based on experience implementing a series of curricular hackathons which provide students with formative design experiences as they address ill-structured…

This article aims to illustrate how the collective resolution of routine mathematical tasks can give rise to uncertainties, fostering and supporting a rich and authentic mathematical activity. While solving routine tasks may not typically be classified as problem-solving, the research presented in this paper shows that, at the collective level,…

Play has been discussed by mathematicians and mathematics educators as essential to mathematical progress and has been widely acknowledged to have a role in learning. Yet, play is rarely acknowledged, leveraged, or studied for mathematics learners beyond early childhood. Moreover, there are theoretical and empirical challenges with designing for…

This study examines the solutions of 34 kindergarten children as they create equal groups from n bottle caps, where n was equal to 8, 9, 22, and 23. For each n, children were asked to find as many different solutions as possible. The number of solutions they found, i.e., children's fluency, as well as the strategies used to create equal groups,…