1. Introduction. The setting is that you have a problem to solve. Not from the textbook, this problem is possibly open-ended and has no straightforward solution. It’s complicated, involving what you know and what assumptions you can make, constraints on resources you can use, and your time to solution. At the beginning, you consider what you can assume is true, you need to consider testing your solutions, and a host of other factors. Let’s look at the assumptions state. This is more familiarly called the "what if" stage. It is a crucial phase in the creative and exploratory dimension of inquiry. It represents the moment when a problem-solver steps beyond what is already known to speculate, imagine, or hypothesize possibilities. It is driven by curiosity, imagination, and the desire to simplify and explore alternative explanations or pathways. Hopefully, you may discover you already follow these steps. Yet, in real-life problems they happen, almost always without an instruct...
