Problem Solving Methodology

One problem that comes to mind is the time I locked my keys in my truck at school. It was the last class of the day, during the fall semester of my senior year of high school. I was going to my truck to get my soccer cleats for practice when I realized I didn't have my keys. When I arrived at my truck, I looked in the driver side window and saw my keys laying in the passenger seat. I realized I must have locked them in there that morning when I went in to class. At first I didn't know what to do. I didn't have a spare key. I tried pulling down the driver and passenger side windows; no luck. I tried pulling open the sliding back window; no luck. After 5 or 10 minutes, I gave up and went into the locker room. As I was sitting there in the soccer locker room, I looked around and saw that there were dozens of wire clothes hangers. The clothes hangers had been there all year and were hardly ever used. That's when I got the idea to use a hanger to try and break in to my truck. I took a hanger, and as I walked back outside to my truck, I unwound the wire to make it a long, straight hook. I got in the back of my truck and inspected my sliding rear window. My idea was to slide the window open by sticking the wire through it and popping open the latch that kept it shut. After a few minutes of working the wire, I got it in the window. It took a few tries, but after a while, I popped the latch to window and slid it open. Then I reached the hook in towards the passenger seat and snagged the key ring with it. Gently, I lifted them back out through the back window and into my hands. Then, having missed the first 20 or 30 minutes of soccer practice, I unlocked my door, called it an early day, and drove home.


-Blake Haynes


The problem that automatically pops into my head was last summer during lifeguarding. A huge storm had hit the night before, and I remember getting woken up by my boss calling me at 7:30 in the morning. Knowing that she was going to ask me to come in early I pondered just letting it go to voice mail, however, I unfortunately decided to answer. As I answered I was immediately greeted with screams of how the pool had gotten really dirty and she needed me to come into work early to get it fixed up before the pool opened at 10. I dragged myself out of bed, tossed on my lifeguarding gear and drove over to work. When I got there I couldn't help but laugh at my boss as she was frantically running around, but then looked at the pool. I had never seen the pool this bad, the wind from the night before had blown chairs and all sorts of stuff into the pool, so I had to get chairs out of the bottom of the pool, but didn't really want to get in the dirty water, so grabbed a pool net bar, and fished the chairs out with that. After this, I didn't even have to ask what to do. I already knew that I had to vacuum the pool, so I when to the supply shed, pulled the pump over to the pool, and then grabbed the hose and the vacuum and attached everything. After this, I cranked the motor until finally it turned on. I started vacuuming the pool, however, while doing so I noticed a dark cloud of stuff coming out of the hose. Just our luck. Apparently the last person that had vacuumed the pool hadn't told our boss that the hose had a hole in it, so now we were faced with trying to fix the hose with the limited supplies we had. We frantically ran around searching for something that would help fix the hose, but of course we couldn't find any duct tape to tape it up with. Still looking around, I decided to see what the medical kit had in it, and found waterproof medical tape. I rushed out to the hose and frantically wrapped the tape around the hose. I used a full roll of the tape just to be safe, and attached everything back together and then started it back up. By the time I finally started vacuuming the pool it was around 9:15ish, and I decided to vacuum as fast as I could and hopefully the pool would be presentable by the time the pool opened (I worked at a country club in Dallas, and lets just say the members were VERY picky about how everything looked, and if something wasn't right, they for sure would let you know). I finished vacuuming the pool, and luckily another lifeguard showed up and got everything set up as I put away the equipment. With the pool finally sparkling clean, and since my boss had cleaned the deck, we were finally done with a few minutes to spare. Apparently, however, because of the big storm the members didn't think the pool would be open, so we didn't end up having our first person show up until noon. All of the good feelings of feeling accomplished had now faded through sitting there and waiting for a member to come. All of that work, and I think we literally had ten people get into the pool that day. By the middle of the day I had just about had it with being at work and everything, except for the news my boss gave me at around 5 o'clock. Because I had come in early and gotten the pool set up, not only did she let me go home early, but I also got paid double for the time I worked when I wasn't supposed to be working yet. Turned out to be a pretty nice reward for all that work after all.


-Sam Cave

I had a class assignment given to me earlier this semester to work with a 9 person group to design a UAV for the Navy. We were given a mission description and then basically told to just start working, before we were really taught what we needed to do. We split up into sub groups and then started looking on Wikipedia for other aircraft that are similar to what we thought we needed just to get some ideas. Unfortunately there wasn't anything that combined all of the features that we were required to have, so we had to ask our professor about ways to combine them without making the aircraft too heavy. The problem with airplane design is that any extra features will always add weight. If your design is overweight, you have to make your wings bigger to increase your lift. Bigger wings mean you have to have more power, so bigger motors. You really need experience to be able to tell if your plane is going to fly or just hop along the runway. The bigger motors make you even heavier so you either have to find a way to drop some structural pieces or you have to choose less ambitious mission goals. We are about halfway through the design right now, and after spending a lot of time online searching and asking everyone we can think of we finally have a concrete direction for the project.

-Scott Hood

Our stories had many different similarities and differences to them. The main similarity was that we had to use something that we wouldn't normally use to fix our problem. This added to the creativity of our stories in that since we didn't have the normal things to fix our problems, we had to improvise in order to get the job done. Not only this, but we also got rewarded from our efforts in some way, being able to go home early, or just by a little extra money, however, with these rewards, our feelings of accomplishment just felt that much sweeter. The problems had to be taken care of immediately, because we were trying to meet deadlines and get what needed to be done taken care of. A feeling of accomplishment was the main thing that we all felt, except we were also tired after our problems were solved, because of how long our problems took us to fix. There weren't any significant differences in the stories, however, what we were actually trying to do did differ. We had people trying to put something back together and on the other hand we had a person trying to "break into" his car in order to be able to use it. Overall, the similarities far exceeded the differences in these stories.

The Reliability of Internet Sources

Many sources of information can be found on the web with a vast range of ideas and viewpoints. When presented with all of these options, it can become challenging to differentiate a legitimate source from others that have no reliability at all. Especially with highly contested issues, the information available can range from very reliable to completely false. Using the theory of evolution as an example, we will discuss what differentiates a useful source from a biased or false one.

The first source we found on evolution was a website called conservapedia. The name of the website itself already illustrates a common problem with politically charged topics. Since the website clearly has a conservative agenda, the information on there will most likely be biased towards that viewpoint. Since this website is also a crowd sourced encyclopedia, the information presented on it only represents the general belief within the culture that is attracted to a conservative website. None of the claims are peer reviewed as in a scholarly journal. Since there is no way to know exactly who provided the information on the site and you know that the information has not been reviewed by a neutral party the source is highly unreliable.

Our next source, by Professor Grover Krantz, is found on the website onelife. This source provides a much more valid interpretation on this topic of evolution. This source is credited to a highly touted Washington State University professor, so not only does the viewer know that they are getting credible information, they can also look up and see information on the professor himself. With further research on Professor Krantz, a viewer can find his resume which proves that he has relevant experience in the field, adding credibility to the source.

The last source we will discuss is this article posted to the Onion back in 2006. The article states that Kansas had supposedly passed a new law to ensure that "the streets, forests, plains, and rivers of Kansas will be safe from the godless practice of evolution." This shows the importance of doing as much research as possible on the website that hosts your source. The Onion is obviously a comedy website, and nothing on it should be used for a serious essay.

While doing this research on evolution, some guidelines that we came up with several guidelines for determining a valid source. First, the source must not be obviously biased. It is best if the source acknowledges several sides of the issue, not just a single point. Also, obvious political ties are an immediate red flag. Next check the mechanics of the writing. If there are grammar errors throughout the source is most likely not reliable. Finally, do research on the author of the source, and check any other authors that they refer to as resources used to produce their text.