Barely four months into his presidency, the youngest elected president in American history gave a speech to a special joint session of congress exhorting the United States to send a man safely to the moon and bring him home, all before the end of the decade of the sixties. The audacity of this challenge needs to be put into perspective. At that point in history, May 25, 1961, the United States hadn’t even put a man in orbit—though the Soviets had. American Alan Shepherd had only reached a mere 116 miles from the surface of the earth. Now John F. Kennedy was challenging the country to send a man on a trip of over 450,000 miles. This was an enormous problem to solve. How did they do it?
They didn’t. In 1961 it was an impossible task to send a man to the moon. Instead, James Webb and the rest of NASA broke down the problem into a series of steps. Build a powerful rocket. Get a man into orbit (John Glenn). Build a more powerful rocket. Put two men into orbit. Get a man to walk in space (Ed White). Execute a rendezvous of two different spacecraft (Gemini VI and Gemini VII ). Build a command craft and a landing craft. Put three men into space. Build the most powerful rocket ever known to humanity (Saturn V). Orbit the moon (Apollo 8). Land on July 20, 1969, before the decade ends, fulfilling the promise of the young president.
Once my students encounter the sixty or so words in a math problem, they have fifty seconds to find the correct answer. After getting their minds right and clarifying the problem, they will to need break down the big problem into its constituent parts, solve each of those parts and then put it all back together to find the answer.
How to Solve Any Problem
Step 1: Get Your Mind Right
Step 2: Identify and Clarify the Problem
Step 3: Break It Down