It seems that everyone today talks about creative problem-solving. Curriculum guides list problem-solving skills as key objectives at all levels, and professional organizations recommend that creative problem solving becomes the focus of school mathematics. Many people believe that the ability to solve problems develops automatically from mastery of computational skills. This is not necessarily true; problem-solving is itself a skill. A problem is more challenging than a typical exercise because the route to the solution is often not known beforehand, and requires some level of creativity.

Creative Problem Solving I – Unusual Patterns

In this video, 2023 CDB Scholar Arul Kolla kicks off a series of videos centered around creative problem solving by talking about “unusual patterns” — when we see patterns that go beyond traditional skip-counting, how do we approach them? In this video, we see a variety of techniques that both help solve these problems and more general ideas for the topic of creative problem-solving.