Interactive Examples

Questions that engage students in a Socratic-dialogue help sequence

Interactive Examples (IE's) are quantitative homework problems whose "help" comes in the form of more questions. Eventually, enough information is given in the helps to work the problems, but we hope that as students work their way through these examples, they acquire some better understanding of how to approach these kinds of problems. In particular, we hope that these examples help students learn to develop problem-solving strategies that are based on conceptual understanding rather than equation manipulation. In fact, once the student correctly answers the initial problem, we present a recap of the solution in terms of sequential conceptual, strategic and quantitative analyses. Following the recap, we ask the student some conceptual follow-up questions to test understanding.