Problem Solving Skills


Some works by George Polya captured my attention recently. In part, this happened because some of his works provide very powerful models to characterize large scale content/resource sharing communities (or systems, if you wish). For example, the Urn Model is suggested by Golder and Hubberman as a model to explain collaborative tagging behavior.

Another interesting work, which I am reading now, is the book How to Solve It. This book brings a methodology to motivate students on the process of strengthening their problem solving skills. I wonder how different it would be if some undergrad professors inspired a little bit of their course mechanics on that material.