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

# Problem

There is a treasure hidden in a building with 50 rooms. Our task is to guess the room with the treasure within six attempts. When we enter a room number, the window will light up. With each guess, the computer will give us one of these hints:

- “Wrong guess! Your guess is too low.”

- “Wrong guess! Your guess is too high.”

- “Congratulations! The number is correct.”

On the list of our room number guesses, the arrow next to the most recent room number tells the direction in which we should move. If the arrow points upward, we should guess a higher number. Similarly, if the arrow points downward, we should guess a lower number.

Get an overview of the problem in this chapter and try to understand it.

Polyas method

Bottom-Up Approach

Top-Down Approach

Wire Length Calculator

Stepwise refinement

Guessing Games

Minesweeper Game

Triangular Wall

Pattern Identification

Conclusion

Understanding the Problem

Problem