ABSTRACT
The solution to the problem is always more problems, not a specific solution. If you have chosen a problem that has a single correct answer, you will defeat the students’ efforts in a very dramatic way. There is nothing more deflating and demoralizing than for students to get to the end of a demanding effort, only to find that the answer was staring at them all the time. They will feel tricked and abused. When they get to the end of a satisfying problem, on the other hand, they have developed a position that satisfies them, given the available information. They have also found how fragmentary and incomplete that information is. They still have several questions they formulated at the beginning that they have not brought to a satisfactory conclusion. They also have several questions that developed only in the last stages of their efforts. Students who end up in this state of partial satisfaction will have succeeded in the exercise.
