Introduction to the Workshop

Purpose

Schedule

What Students Should Do

1. Try the questions when they first appear;
2. Consult the hints if stuck on a particular question;
3. Carefully read the solutions to not only see correct approaches to the problems, but also to see examples of properly written solutions.

Tips for Writing Good Solutions

• Do your work in rough first, before you write up your final solution. It's a good idea to figure out how to do the question in rough first before you go about writing your good copy to hand in. This will actually save you time in the long run, and make your solutions much easier to understand.
• Make sure you understand all of the details of the question. This prevents you from having to stop and add things to your solution haphazardly.
• Organize your thoughts. Writing a good solution is just like writing a good essay: it requires organization. A well-organized solution is well on the way to being a good solution.
• Use lots of words in your solutions. Don't just write out the equations - you have to explain what you are doing and why you can do it.

The goal of a good solution is that you want someone who has no idea how to do the question to be able to understand your solution without having to figure too much out. Following the tips above should help you to write a good solution.

Try practicing writing good solutions by following the above suggestions while working on the Problem Sets from the Descartes Electronic Workshop. Once you have written your own solutions, compare them to the ones on the Web and look for any differences. This is a great way to check on your progress. Or, show your solutions to your teachers and ask them to critique them. Using these two methods, your solution writing will almost certainly improve.

A Word About Marking