On March 17, 2011, I attended the session on educational puzzles.  Here is a link to the EGC to provide a bit more info: http://gaming.psu.edu/node/1082

As you can tell by the date, I’m a bit behind…

Definitely an interesting session that introduced puzzles as a way to make bland assignments much more interesting. 

One idea that resonated with me was how puzzles could be used in science and math to help students understand that it is okay to make mistakes. In many science and math courses, the idea is that the instructor as the master go through problem after problem, perfectly manipulating the expressions to come to a specific answer. In real experience, problems aren’t necessarily that straightforward and may require some lateral thinking to come up with a possible answer. Puzzles could be the perfect solution to this dilemma.