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Solving problems: young children exploring the rules of the game

This article is not a review of the problem-solving literature but instead explores the idea of children developing problem-solving tactics as learning to applying the ‘rules of the game’, based on Wittgenstein's concept of ‘language games’. The kind of learning under discussion here is not learning of facts. I will not be discussing how we learn to recite the two times table but, rather, the dawning of understanding of what those facts mean: when a child realizes that the two times table divides up the whole universe into sets of either odds or evens. The necessity of accepting the rules of the game in order to perceive relevancy in determining problem-solutions was illustrated by Donaldson's (1992) work with small children. The existence of general rules, and hence generic problem-solving skills, is discussed and a model for problem-solving is suggested. The article concludes with some observations on the role of rule-breaking in discovery and invention. Examples are taken from the author's observations of young children in English classrooms.