Learn Polya’s problem-solving process and strategies, such as divide and conquer and pattern identification, to enhance your analytical skills, tackle puzzles, and solve real-world problems.

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Problem-solving skills are vital for personal growth, academic success, and professional achievement. They enable resilience, innovation, and effective decision-making. This course equips you with a lifelong skill set by teaching Polya’s problem-solving process and its applications in tackling real-world problems, games, and puzzles.

You will explore strategies, including top-down and bottom-up approaches, divide and conquer, stepwise refinement, pattern identification, and logical reasoning through puzzle-solving and computing logic.

By the end of the course, you’ll master analytical skills and critical thinking to apply Polya’s method and other strategies to complex challenges. This comprehensive approach establishes a strong foundation for systematically solving intricate problems.

Problem Solving

# Strategy

Now, we know the basics of the game. We've gathered all the information from the problem statement and need to come up with a strategy to achieve win the game...but we don't know how to do that. Let's ask ourselves the following questions:

- Do we have to be specific while guessing the mine?

- Should our guesses about which cells are mines be precise?

- Can we use the information we have in a logical manner to find the mines?

We can divide our problem into multiple subproblems and solve them to find the solution, but how? 

Let’s say we are in the middle of the game and we have some cells covered and others uncovered. We can select a specific cell and solve its adjacent cells to eliminate the mines. For example, as shown in the board below:

Develop a strategy to solve this problem.

Polyas method

Bottom-Up Approach

Top-Down Approach

Wire Length Calculator

Stepwise refinement

Guessing Games

Minesweeper Game

Triangular Wall

Pattern Identification

Conclusion

Devising a Plan: Strategy

Strategy