Testimony of Mr. José Mª Delgado Casado, Professor of Electrotechnical Installations who teaches classes in the higher degree training cycle of Automation and Industrial Robotics at the Javier García Téllez IES in Cáceres, Spain.

My students are quite old (they all are, at least, eighteen years old), and they come from very different educational situations, some have completed intermediate-level training cycles, others High School, and others already have a vast work experience, but in every case, they have a very rigid way of thinking that leads them to need long explanations to understand the statements of the problems, they have little capacity to learn by discovery and to solve problems and breakdowns in real life.

These creative thinking skills are very difficult to develop in this advanced stage of their schooling and more so given the breadth of the contents of the robotics cycle curriculum, that is why I use techniques such as lateral thinking to work in a motivating way to solve enigmas. through a different and creative look at problems.

I use the technique from two aspects:
– As dynamics in the classroom:
An enigma is presented to the whole class at the beginning of each didactic unit, and although I start from existing sources (Tesla enigmas or other bibliography), I bring it closer to the subject of the industry and the problems that could arise in automation and robotics of an industrial process.
The whole class, in a group dynamic, will ask questions that lead to testing different solutions to the enigma and we will debate in class which is the optimal one.

– As an individual thinking exercise:
In this case, we work it as an individual exercise, then, I want the student to be able to think of puzzles or enigmas to propose to the class.
Pedagogical advantages
As I have said previously, the advantages of this type of activities are multiple since, when working from different groups (group, class and individually) different advances can be obtained. But in a general way we can affirm that they are especially useful activities proposed as motivation and detection of erroneous preconceptions.

On the other hand, and as a fundamental purpose, they have to awaken a way of thinking and approaching problems that is more open and much more creative and autonomous on the part of the students.

As in all the activities placed in the workshop, it is essential to know our students and their individual characteristics in order to favor the integration and participation of all the students in the dynamics.

It is also important to bring the thematic of enigmas or puzzles closer to the syllabus of the subject since this allows working on that part of detecting erroneous preconceptions and previous knowledge.

Taken and customized for the area, classroom, and my students from NiKola Tesla’s puzzle collection:

Wiring
“Tesla has been layingcwires in his new lab. He has three identical ones, ranging from the basement to his office on the top floor. 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 you 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?

Brain gathering
A group of eminent scientists meet in Munich:

All but two are experts in industrial robotics
All but two are experts in mechatronics
All but two are experts in mobile robotics

How many experts did you meet?

Energy supply

Place a lightning bolt in a square adjacent to each lightbulb on the board
Adjacent squares share a side, not a vertex
Two rays cannot appear together in each row or columns must appear as many symbols as the Roman numerals indicate.

Technical Support

Four clients of your internet company have called technical support to report a series of problems. Could you find out about each user with their password, email and what problem they have?

A) The user who accessed his iestellez account with the password pgomez 812 has the same user numbers as the one who lost the files.
B) Mar3Bme is the password of user CB1.
C) The user who had no internet connection to access him Educarex account, have a longer username than the person with the most obvious password
D) SnOOpee does not use iestellez but its system has a very harmful virus