Ponder this question for a few minutes and see if you can come up with a solution.
You are the manager of a hardware store and three boxes arrive from the warehouse and the delivery driver says, “The warehouse told me that all 3 boxes have the wrong label on them. One has only bolts, one has only nuts, and one has both nuts and bolts.” You need to drop ship these boxes to the buyers, hopefully without damaging all of the boxes. How could you take only one item out of only one box and then label them all properly?
That’s a mysterious question, right? It seems as though there’s not enough information or that something is missing. Exactly. We’ll discuss a solution at the end. Don't look ahead!
Why do humans like to play video games? Why do we like to explore nature? Why do we read and watch movies? Why do we enjoy gifts so much? We spend a great deal of time enjoying these activities because of the mystery. What happens on the next level of this game? What’s over the top of that hill? How will the protagonist get out of this bind that she has found herself in? What will happen if I mix these chemicals? What’s in the box?
How can a teacher increase mystery in their class? Any teacher of any subject can do it with just a few tweaks.
Puzzles: Puzzles embed mystery into an activity. I watched a group of geometry students reviewing for a test by solving math problems to get clues to open locks on a mystery box (this one happened to be a BreakoutEDU box) with a treat inside. They were so motivated by the mystery of opening the box that they didn’t even realize that they were doing math problems. Many people have put instructions online about how to do miniature or virtual escape room activities in their classrooms. Students pay good money to go to escape rooms. They’ll be thrilled to do one in math class!
Discrepant Events: Discrepant events are events that students believe are going to turn out one way and they turn out a totally different way. They could be exceptions to a rule (mammoths that lay eggs, numbers that cannot be on the bottom of a fraction, the octet rule in chemistry). Often discrepant events are science demonstrations that surprise the viewer, but there’s so much more to discrepant information than that.
Probative Questions: English teachers are so good at this...setting up a mystery by asking students what they think will happen next or what they think that an object or action in the story means. These conversations are what make literature exciting and turn students into lifelong readers. Students are apt to be motivated to read ahead when their teacher sets up this curious state. The following series of questions can be used in any classroom at any grade level to engage mystery and enhance curiosity.
What did you notice?
What do you wonder?
What else do you need to know?
Special note for math teachers: Dan Meyer has a great TED talk about mathematics that demonstrates how to take word problems, which students generally hate, and turn them into curiosity-inducing mystery problems that kids will love. Solving word problems is probably the most important skill that students will learn in mathematics. Anything that motivates students to get better at this skill will reap great benefits.
Meyer recommends taking all of the “given” information out of a book word problem and turning it into a real-world problem. Instead of giving the dimensions of a container and asking how long it will take to fill it up, take a video of a real container filling up. Have students take measurements, ask questions, and perform their calculations, and then watch how glued they are to the video seeing if their answer was correct...if they solved the mystery.
Check out the video here: https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_meyer_math_class_needs_a_makeover?language=en
Now, back to the question at the beginning. The catch is that if you reach into a box that has both nuts and bolts in it, then you’re stuck. Because they are all known to be marked wrong, the one that says nuts and bolts on it definitely does NOT have both. If you reach into that box, you are guaranteed to be reaching into a box containing a single type of item. So reach into the “Nuts and Bolts” box, label that one with whatever is in it, and then swap the other two labels. Simple enough? Engaged by the mystery?
