Puzzles take many forms depending on many cognitive abilities, like wordplay, lateral thinking, arithmetic, and spatial reasoning. A certain class of puzzles depends on mental model alignment, or internalizing a set of rules for predicting and explaining observations of a system. Leveraging mental models creates a spectrum of experiences between puzzles, which have handcrafted, usually unique, solutions, and problems, which specify what counts as a solution within a wide solution space. Problems whose solutions are algorithms are programming problems. We observe a pattern in successful techniques for building accurate mental models through interaction---specifically, informative failure---and discuss its application to three points along this spectrum: puzzles, problems, and programs.

Speaker: Chris Martens

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