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Teaching students how to solve problems can keep frustration to a minimum.
DESPITE EDUCATORS' EFFORTS to ensure that students become good at problem solving, many of them just don't get it That in itself is a problem, because engineers' primary stock in trade is their ability to develop answers to both simple and complex questions.
There are basically two types of problems: exercises (or routines) and novel problems. Exercises are solved by using a known algorithm; once the algorithm is recognized, finishing the solution is straightforward, although perhaps tedious. With novel problems the known algorithms do not work, and problem solving becomes what you do when you don't know what to do.
Students initially find almost every task to be novel, while we would hope that graduating seniors will consid er most of the curriculum to be exercises. In fact, curriculums are essentially defined by the set of tasks we expect graduates to be able to solve as exercises,...