Afamous mathematician once said that mathematics is a search for
patterns. Patterns occur in many situations. Students need practice
in examining data to see if a pattern exists. Some problems will actually
state that a pattern exists in a sequence of numbers and ask the student to
find the pattern and/or continue the sequence for an additional few terms.
Other problems may require a table or list to organize the data and see if a
pattern emerges. However, a very powerful problem-solving strategy for
problems that do not directly call for finding a pattern is, in fact, to search
for a pattern and then use it to solve the problem.