SPONSORS

Centre de recherches mathématiques

Fields Institute

MITACS

Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Sciences

University of Western Ontario
University of Western Ontario
Department of Mathematics
Faculty of Education
Faculty of Science
Research Western
Department of Applied Mathematics

Support from these sponsors is gratefully acknowledged.

Adrien Pouliot Award

RICHARD NOWAKOWSKI, Dalhousie University
"Can you repeat that, sir?" [PDF]

One of a teacher's main responsibilities is to get the students engaged with the material. How one does this depends on the interests of the teacher and the material. `Problem solving' is my favourite approach. I'll present some of my most successful problems for first year students. All of the problems evoke the words in the title and I'll discuss why I think they work. Note: two of these problems have been solved by first year students but not by any faculty members. (No calculators and and only a smattering of High School mathematics is required to solve most of the problems. Even less mathematics is required to understand the problems as they are drawn from `real life'.)