Sunday, August 23, 2009

Non-standard problems

Going over non-standard math problems ( math riddles) books, I notice that they do repeat from book to book. Some of the problems are really ancient, they come to us from the indian and arabic tales, old monastery textbooks, etc. This makes me think that
1. they are non-trivial in any educational system
2. they tell us something about our brain
3. it is not trivial to come up with this type of problems.

So, my question is
1. what makes these problems non-trivial?
2. where are the people who know how to generate these problems?
3. how could I learn to generate these problems?

You inputs are welcome!
Best regards,
Julia

2 comments:

  1. MariaDAugust 23, 2009 at 3:50 PM

    I talked to Sam Vandervelde at Great Circles, and he seemed to know a thing or two about generating problems ;-)

    My questions are:
    4. how can we help kids generate their own problems?
    5. how can we then help kids sort their problems into meaningful categories, for example, trivial, routine, computational, interesting?

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  2. JuliaAugust 24, 2009 at 12:27 PM

    Thanks, I'll try to contact him :)
    Yes, I think it would be really great to teach the kids to generate their own problems; may be that is more important than anything else.

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