Sample Problems

Below are some problems that have proved to be successful.

The Buffalo Commons
Garbage to Gold
Superland!
Cosmic Collisions
Bernard C. Hollister's Home Page
Astrophysics at IMSA
IPBLN Problem Bank
Summer Sleuths
The Case of the Wrongful Projections

The Buffalo Commons

Problem-based learning, like the process of problem solving itself, is best understood by actually experiencing it. To this end, we have prepared a situation through which we hope to give you a more complete understanding of the "feel" of problem-based learning, as well as a practical understanding of how the process of PBL unfolds.

You'll travel along a problem-based learning highway with side roads that will connect you to other pages on the site, as well as guideposts to highlight your steps along the way. You will also find places to obtain feedback, much like stopping to ask for information as you proceed on your journey through the problem. In this way, we hope that you will feel connected and supported as you experience the PBL process.

Garbage to Gold

During the fall of 1994, we worked with approximately fifty teachers from nine school teams in a series of six full-day design and implementation sessions, supporting each school team in finding an appropriate garbage-related problem within their own community and creating a problem-based curriculum based upon this situation. Using a prototype landfill problem as a model, teachers designed units and prepared accompanying teaching and learning plans taking in account the school's culture, the students' learning needs and abilities, and district outcomes (Finkle, et al., 1994). Units which emerged placed students in the midst of wide-ranging, authentic, problematic situations from reducing waste at school to community recycling; from large-scale incineration in their neighborhood to the location of county landfills; and from reusing items when appropriate to the safe and legal disposal of biohazardous waste dating from 1939 located in the basement of an inner-city hospital.

Superland!

A proposal has been made to build a new super-theme park in southern Illinois, to be called SuperLand!. A group of investors from the United States and Japan have joined together on this venture to design and build the largest theme park in the world. They have chosen southern Illinois because of its central location and proximity to such major metropolitan areas as Louisville, Memphis, St. Louis, Nashville, and Chicago.
It is planned that SuperLand! be built on 1500 acres located just outside of Metropolis, Illinois. The land is situated near the Ohio River, and the amusement park will be accessable by a new proposed highway, monorail from the local airport (which will need to be enlarged), high speed rail from major cities, and by riverboat.

Cosmic Collisions

SU astronomer Dr. Carl Wenning has asked the Summer 'AD'Ventures I team for their help in evaluating the risk associated with Near Earth Objects (NEOs) colliding with the earth. Dr. Wenning's studies over the past several years have included observations of comets and asteroids with orbits which bring them close to the earth. Astronomers estimate that only a small number of these objects have been identified to date, leaving the vast majority of NEOs, possibly in earth-crossing orbits, undetected.
The urgency of Dr. Wenning's interest in NEOs has been heightened by a very recent and startling discovery that the earth has a companion asteroid which has an orbit influenced by our gravitational field. Although this asteroid poses no immediate threat, Dr. Wenning fears that there may be many more such asteroids which have yet to be discovered, perhaps one or more with the potential to impact the earth and cause global catastrophe. Dr. Wenning points out that two spectacular NEO impacts have occurred in Siberia and Brazil during this century alone. For this reason, Dr. Wenning is writing a proposal for increased funding for the search for NEOs and is asking for an observational facility to be built in the midwest.