iPads, MakerEd and More in Education

Problem-solving skills are necessary in all areas of life, and classroom problem solving activities can be a great way to get students prepped and ready to solve real problems in real life scenarios. Whether in school, work or in their social relationships, the ability to critically analyze a problem, map out all its elements and then prepare a workable solution is one of the most valuable skills one can acquire in life.

Educating your students about problem solving skills from an early age in school can be facilitated through classroom problem solving activities. Such endeavors encourage cognitive as well as social development, and can equip students with the tools they’ll need to address and solve problems throughout the rest of their lives. Here are five classroom problem solving activities your students are sure to benefit from as well as enjoy doing:

To remedy the situation, and grow fruitful and happy students within the confines of the syllabus you are bound to, start to fix the problem yourself by creating an atmosphere of problem-solving in your classes. Create situations where students have to think for themselves. Here are some ideas:

Countless articles and blogs are being written on a daily basis pushing back on the coding movement suggesting “not all kids will be professional coders!”

Totally!
But that isn’t why we teach certain subjects. As a phys ed teacher, I don’t anticipate every student playing in the NBA (but I don’t discourage it either!). A well rounded approach to education is the best fit and by today’s standards, coding should be included.

Technology has become vital to our day-to-day lives and critical in the K-12 classroom. In a tech-saturated market, parents of our students have raised questions about how artificial intelligence (AI) will impact their future careers.

Whether you believe AI has potential to meet or surpass human intelligence, it is imperative that we equip students with skills to match the nearing demands of the future workplace. Computational thinking (CT) is the latest skill set that addresses the demands of the future workplace. CT enables us to analyze and process data algorithmically, and often visually. CT offers a process for problem-solving, where one develops a series of steps (an algorithm) to solve open-ended problems. Put simply, it’s a framework to approach problems like a computer would: by processing data in a well-defined series of steps.

Traditionally, we went to school to attain knowledge. The smart kids knew that Columbus discovered America in 1492 and that the square root of 64 is eight. They studied diligently at home so that when the teacher asked a question they could shoot their hand up and be praised for their good work.

Today, however, teenagers carry far more information and computing power in their pockets than would ever fit in their heads. So the ability to retain knowledge and manipulate numbers with facility has become, to a large extent, outdated skills. So kids today need to learn how to understand systems and solve problems.

Fortunately, there are an increasing number of programs that are designed to do just that. At the college level, programs like Stanford's d.school teach design thinking and entrepreneurship classes have become standard in business school curriculums. More recently, a wide variety of secondary school level programs have begun to take hold and are giving students a leg up.