Examples

This technique will be developed as recurring group work throughout the course and will serve as an introductory activity to each didactic unit, to present the specific matter of said unit and that leads us to a series of pedagogical advantages that are pursued with this task.

To carry out this example, let’s take as a reference a group of 16 students.

In the first session, the class must clearly explain how the activity will be carried out throughout the course.

In this session, the figures that will be in each enigma are explained:

• The “storyteller” that is the teacher
• The research guides (two students who are chosen in the previous didactic unit for being the first to solve the enigma or in alphabetical order if those students have already been guides) who will be the ones who know the resolution because the teacher has given it to them. in writing and explained.
• The rest of the students, who are the ones who ask the questions that the guides will answer. And they must try to solve the riddle individually through collective investigation.

That is, the teacher explains the enigma, paradox, practical case … relying on videos, workshop materials, catalogs … to the whole class and the solution only to the two students who will be the guides in this activity and who must respond and manage peers’ questions.

The investigation (questions to the two students who guide the investigation) will end when the whole class has a resolution hypothesis or after a maximum of ten minutes.

In the subsequent sessions, the students already know the dynamics of the activity and it is only necessary to pose the specific “enigma”.

In our classroom, a project on Nikola Tesla and the basic concepts of Energy generation is proposed, in this context in an intermediate didactic unit, it is proposed to work on triphasic lines, for this the following enigma proposed in The collection of Nikola Tesla puzzles from Libsa publishing house:

“Tesla has been laying cables in his new lab. He has three identical ones, ranging from the basement to his upstairs office. The cables are labeled at both ends. Unfortunately, after the cables have been run through the building they find that the labels (A, B and C) that he attached to the cables upstairs have fallen off.

How many trips do you have to take down the stairs to find out which cable is?

 The clues the guides have to offer is that they have a machine that will tell them if a current is going through a wire and you are alone.

The team that is going to “guide” the enigma is also given the solution.

Tesla has to make a minimum of two trips down the stairs.

Tesla goes down to the basement where the labeled wires are. He connects wire A to wire B and goes back up. He is putting two ends of cable to his machine (at that moment there are three possible combinations) until he finds the combination that shows that there is current, that is, the one that closes the circuit. The cable not connected at the moment is C and he labels it. Connect that cable C with one of the other two and go down to the basement, there it connects the C with the A, if when going up there is current in the machine, the one that is connected to the C is the A, otherwise it does not give current is the B, so you can now have all the cables labeled.

The class should ask the questions that can lead to the solution. The teacher should have guiding questions prepared in case it is necessary since the class does not intervene as expected, for example:

Does Tesla have help?

What tools does Tesla have?

The guides answer the questions and write down the clues that appear on the board, in the most visual way possible.

Each student has an adhesive sticker / paper that he must stick / place with a magnet on the board upside down at the moment he thinks he has the solution, noting the time that has elapsed.

When all the classmates have made their decision / answer, it is analyzed on the board when the answers were given (which are pasted chronologically and which ones were (correct or not), whoever gave the correct answer in the first place explains what It led him to that idea and it is assessed whether any of the other answers, despite not being the real assumption initially, could also be a solution to the problem.

This example was proposed by IES Javier García Téllez .