Presents a condensed method for involving students in the kind of theatrical problem-solving that transforms a script to a play. Describes how to incorporate a "human slide show" into the class. Notes that students must read plays not just to understand events, but to make artistic choices about how to stage the action so that an…

Describes a university consumer affairs course using management tools to improve problem-solving skills. The Interaction Method teaches specific material and enables learning through participation. (SK)

Presents two lessons that teach students problem-solving behaviors for the classroom. (SR)

Examines elementary students' perspectives on the engagement potential of particular mathematical problems and students' views on classroom problem-solving activities in general. Nonroutine examples that focused on important reasoning processes and did not involve computation had the greatest engagement potential, whereas computational problems…

Collectively, technological literacy embraces everything from intelligent consumerism to concerns about environmental degradation, ethics, and elitism. Technological problem solving can have social, ecological, or technological goals and may be categorized by four types: invention, design, trouble shooting, and procedures. Every citizen should be…

Describes a personal problem solving-inquiry journey, working on a problem suggested by an activity on probability observed in a junior primary classroom. Presents reflective thoughts about the mathematical and pedagogical lessons to be learned from this journey. (ASK)

Some of the most provocative problems in mathematics concern logical paradoxes. Provides a series of paradoxes for students to consider. (CCM)

Presents solutions for a problem concerning doubling a recipe from a previous article on number concepts in the October 1997 issue. (ASK)

Explains Occam's razor which is a guiding principle in scientific methodology. Describes a genetics problem to demonstrate Occam's razor. (YDS)

Finds that many activities that have been called "problems" are merely exercises or tricks. Offers a clearer definition of the word "problem". Notes some of the classroom implications of the new insight. (Author/CCM)

Presents responses to a problem appearing in the December, 1998 issue on the concept of determining all possibilities for colored and numbered wristbands for students. (ASK)

Discusses ways of using six literature books to study mathematics in which students read about mathematics in the context of literature to explore problems embedded in the context of a story. (ASK)

Discusses a real-world problem-solving lesson that emerged when a high school math teacher used a motion detector with a CBL and graphing calculator to obtain the bounce data of a ping-pong ball. Describes the lesson in which students collect bad data then fill in the missing parabolas that result using critical components of parabolas and…

Describes the Six Circle problem which consists of the numbers 1-6, six circles, and asks whether it is possible to put the numbers in the circles--which are configured in a triangle--so that the sums of the three numbers on either side are the same. (NB)

This note gives geometrical/graphical methods of finding solutions of the quadratic equation ax[squared] + bx + c = 0, a [not equal to] 0, with non-real roots. Three different cases which give rise to non-real roots of the quadratic equation have been discussed. In case I a geometrical construction and its proof for finding the solutions of the…