Understand the problem: some considerations to develop at this step involve drawing a figure and asking
questions like What is the unknown? What is the condition? Is it possible to satisfy the condition? Is the
condition sufficient to determine the unknown? Or is
it insufficient? Or redundant? Or contradictory? That
is, at this stage students need to actually be sure what
the problem is. In addition to making drawings to get a
grasp of the problem, students might need to reformulate the problem in their own words,
making sure that
they are obtaining all the given information needed for
solving the problem. This is a crucial step in the sense
that if we do not know where are we going, any route
will take us there.