Solving Word Problems with the Design Recipe

The three steps of the Design Recipe are designed to mirror best practices that you may already be using in your classroom. It’s merely a collection of those practices, assembled in a structured way with great care taken to connecting each practice with the others.

Writing the Contract and Purpose Statement is where students understand the word problem. If you have your students restate the problem in their own words, draw pictures, or underline the inputs and outputs in the word problem, you’re already using this practice!

Writing examples and circling-and-labeling what changes is where students apply their understanding to concrete inputs. If you have your students work through some concrete examples before jumping straight to variables and formulas, and ask them "what’s the rule?" or "what’s the pattern?", you’re already using this practice!.

Writing the definition is where students formalize and abstract this understanding to work with any input. This is where they identify the structure of the rule or pattern, independently of any specific inputs.

The order of the recipe is a recommendation based on 20+ years of research about what works for most students, but that doesn’t mean this order works best for every student! Some may find it easier to work through a concrete example or two before thinking about Domain and Range, and there’s nothing wrong with that. We encourage you to use the Recipe in your classroom as often as possible, teaching students to be flexible with the tools and representations it includes.

This is a powerful tool that forces students to explain their thinking, making deeper connections between steps, and helps teachers guide students to find their own mistakes. It requires two people: the Challenger, and the Defender. Most of the time, the teacher is in the role of Challenger.

The Challenger starts at the bottom of the page, physically pointing to one part of the Definition and asking "Where’d you get that?" The Defender has to physically point somewhere in the Examples, and explain what they’re pointing to supports their Definition.

Next, the Challenger starts asking about the Examples and the Defender needs to show how their Contract and Purpose support them. This is repeated for every other step in the recipe, as students work their way back to the original word problem:

Most computer programs are written by teams, and sometimes those teams represent hundreds of people spread across the world! It is critical that each team member records their thinking with enough detail for other team members to be able to pick up where they left off. In Design Recipe Telephone, students collaborate to complete a series of Design Recipe Problems, with each student being responsible for only one part of each problem in the set.

You can use any word problems you like, but we have provided two sets that lend themselves particularly well to the activity. One set can be used to collaboratively update the functions in Collaboration Starter File - For use with Design Recipe Telephone Set 1, which generates a cool mystery image if all three problems are solved correctly!

Optionally: At the end of the activity, students swap papers with a partner to conduct a Design Recipe Peer review. Use Rubric: Design Recipe to facilitate this process.