While IT and engineering students are trained to recognise familiar problems with known solutions, they may not be sufficiently prepared to address novel real-world problems(Falkneret al., 2010). We must train our students to reach the required levels of analytical and computational thinking, rather than hoping that it will just ‘develop’. As educators, we are interested in teaching “critical thinking skills”. As a step in this direction, we have experimented with Puzzle-based Learning (PBL) as an active learning approach to teach students to frame and solve unstructured problems in an undergraduate and a postgraduate IT unit. A puzzle, in an educational context, is a problem satisfying several if not all of the following conditions: a) generality: it explains some universal problem-solving principles; b) simplicity: it does not have the complexity of a real-world problem; c) eureka factor: it often has counter-intuitive solutions that surprise the problem-solver; d) entertainment factor: it often entertains the problem-solver (Michalewicz & Michalewicz, 2008). This presentation will demonstrate an application of the puzzle-based learning approach to enable active learning in an undergraduate level computer networking unit and a postgraduate-level programming unit at Southern Cross University. During the presentation, participants will have the chance to play with some of the puzzles.
Falkner, N.,Sooriamurthi, R., & Michalewicz, Z. (2010). Puzzle-based learning for engineering and computer science. Computer,43(4), 20-28.
https://cs.adelaide.edu.au/~zbyszek/Papers/PBL-IEEE.pdf
Merrick, K. E. (2010). An empirical evaluation of puzzle-based learning as an interest approach for teaching introductory computer science. IEEE Transactions on Education,53(4), 677-680.https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/5378490
Michalewicz, Z., & Michalewicz, M. (2008). Puzzle-based learning. Australia: Hybrid Publishers.