Re: unexpected obstacles, incomplete questions

["John S. Denker" <jsd@MONMOUTH.COM>]

On Mon, 16 Dec 2002, Larry Cartwright wrote:
>
>Why do you do this; i.e., what is the purpose of this purposeful
>obfuscation?

Michael N. Monce replied

>         The purpose is to get the students to work on their own, gain
> direct experience in thinking through problems, and making decisions with
> regard to data.  For this sophomore/junior level course I am trying to
> simulate a realistic experimental research environment.

Amen, brother.

This is a good practice;  it doesn't deserve to
be tagged with pejorative words like "obfuscation".

Any homework problem (except for the crudest plug-and-chug
questions) contains some degree of incompleteness.
Consider a question as simple as "find the moment
of inertia of a copper cube 12 cm on a side".  A
whiny student might complain about "obfuscation"
because you didn't give them on a platter the
density of copper, and you didn't give them on
a platter the formula for moment of inertia of
a cube.

Living in the real world requires dealing with
less-than-fully-specified problems.  Indeed you're
lucky if incompleteness is the only problem;
commonly the problem contains extraneous or even
contradictory information that you need to sort
out.  For more on this see
  http://www.monmouth.com/~jsd/physics/ill-posed.htm