Vincent Bianca was a great guinea pig. He had his strengths and his weakness while solving the Hobbits and Orcs problem. One of his strengths was that no matter what he was determined to solve this problem. Even after he got stuck multiple times and had to retrace his last few steps. Also, he always kept a positive attitude while solving the problem and never got discouraged. One of the six computational methods Vincent kept trying to do was balancing with memory. The following quote shows a little bit about Vincent’s balancing approach, “I thought I was really close there. Four creatures on top and two on bottom half and half orcs and hobbit”. Vincent’s second strength is he tends to think like an expert, but he also had his novice thinking …show more content…
If I had taken an orc from down here it would have been two orcs up North. I think those are my only two options. I could also send two orcs, but that would outnumber the hobbits. And I could send to Hobbit's but that would, oh! There's a solution.” Since Vincent was now using a memory approach versus in the beginning when he used a no memory approach, he was able to find and see his error and correct it. Vincent said in reference to his mistake of reversing a step “I’m scratching out my error [on his paper] to get that out of my head”. Overall our novice Vincent had many strengths in solving the Hobbits and Orcs problem, such as: his determination, thinking like an expert at times and mapping out his moves off to the side. He also had his weaknesses, such as: never actually solving a logic problem, thinking like a novice at times and complete reversal of his previous steps. Although being a novice when you have no experience in solving a logic problem is not really a weakness, in Vincent’s case it was sometimes the crutch that kept him from solving the problem sooner. It was not really him thinking like a novice it was more his approach to the problem at first, for instance when he chose a no memory approach because he “didn’t want to keep drawing a new shore every time” and he found “it easier to just erase and rewrite the H’s and O’s”. Later he did figure out that it was not easier to just erase the H’s and O’s. The second approach was also a very novice like move, which was attempting to use the balance with memory approach. It was one of the methods that kept causing him to get