ABSTRACT
In this chapter we turn our attention to children everywhere working hard to understand everything in their worlds and doing this without the need of specialist resources. We examine how aspects of the worlds that children live in raise questions in their minds or pose problems for them to solve. We see how children develop a range of strategies as problem solvers and in doing this make hypotheses, try these out, analyse what happens, identify patterns, generate rules, use analogy, come to conclusions and move on. The problems children address range from very simple physical phenomena such as why things always fall downwards, to more complex things like why people fight, how people came to be living where they live, who makes up the rules, where the rain comes from, what it feels like to be powerful and so on.
