Students must visualize the situation by using their own experiences. The problem can not be solved in one step by plugging numbers into a formula. These characteristics emphasize the need for students to make decisions by using their physics knowledge. They encourage students to view physics problem-solving as something that they can do successfully and imagine doing in their future careers. They discourage the view that problem solving in physics is a purely mathematical exercise with no real-world applications for the average person.
Students practice reducing the problem to something they can calculate.
More information maybe be given in the problem statement than is required to solve the problems. Similarly, relevant information, which can be estimated fro the students' base of general knowledge, may be missing from the statement. Assumptions may beed to bemade to solve the problem. The students must decide what idealizations make a problem more tractable and if that idealization would make the solution unusable. These characteristics reinforce problem solving as decision making.