Dave Cormier describes how, according to Herbert Simon, there are well-structured problems and the rest that is left over. Cormier explians why he prefers to focus on the “left overs”.
A well-structured problem almost never happens to me in real life. At work, as a parent, as a partner, as a citizen I am almost never in a position where I’m given a clear question that isn’t messy in some way, a process that I can follow, and a way for someone to say ‘yeah, you did that exactly right’. And when I am, I can mostly just use a GenAI tool to get there.
The things that are meaningful, to me, are about real life. They aren’t about chess, they aren’t about puzzles, they are about how each of us faces the uncertainty around us. With all these GenAI discussions swirling around I’m even more interested in how we learn when things are uncertain.
Moving beyond ‘solving’ problems as meaningful learning- a conference #ShrugCon by Dave Cormier
For me, this touches on Dan Meyer’s comments about ChatGPT-4o and mathematics:
This looks like success to many. To me it looks like someone has successfully diced an onion without understanding why we’re hosting the dinner party, what we hope our guests experience, or how we’re going to structure the evening.
We can focus students on larger ideas by asking other questions.
What is the question asking you to do?
What do you know about that?
What is special about this triangle?
What do you know about sine?
Source: ChatGPT-4o Will Be Great for Certain Math, Certain Thinking, and Certain Kids by Dan Meyer