Quote:
Originally Posted by lastcardcharlie
How to ask for help on a problem (knowing what to ask?)
Deciding what information is useful and what info can be ignored.
Not falling into tons of traps that are personal to you. I.e. i know i can miss a negative sign very easily, im prone to it, so i make myself be careful with negative numbers.
If somethings too hard, you can skip it.
If somethings too easy, you can get suspicious.
If im taking a test and I cant solve a problem, I skip it. Then when im done with the test, i skim the test looking for any clues that will tip me off as to how to solve the problem.
different ways of brainstorming have also really helped me with problem solving.
here's one. when doing a math problem, you can sometimes give it a once over and estimate the answer. then when you really solve the problem, if your answer is way off from that, you can get suspicious. Its rare that this works, but if, for instance, your finding the mins and maxs of a function, sometimes you can see "oh ****, the max is at about 3, so if i get 24 i know i fk*d up"
sometimes you can carve portions of the number line from the set of possible answers. I do this in my head sometimes. when i see x^2 i can picture the output as an arrow going to the right from 0 on the number line. I can also picture the graph, which is a very different picture.