Plan a solution: some considerations to have in mind
in order to develop this step involve looking at the unknown and trying to think of a familiar problem having
the same or a similar unknown. Some questions to be
asked are: Have you seen this before? Or have you
seen the same problem in a slightly different form?
Once the student as all the many possibilities of approaching approach the problem, he/she only needs
to pick one strategy of solution and write down the
corresponding mathematical formulation of the problem, avoiding as much as possible plugging numbers
into the respective equations. Also, they need to think
whether the information at hand would be enough to
find a solution (i.e. if a set of algebraic equations is
under-or over-determined, or if the number of boundary conditions provided is enough to solve a differential equation).