Guide to Teaching Puzzle-based Learning

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.

• 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.

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)