Teaching Note: Active Learning Exercise: Newspaper Page Layout
Nelson Devia and Richard Weber
Department of Industrial Engineering, Universidad de Chile, Republica 701, Santiago, Chile {ndevia@ing.uchile.cl, rweber@dii.uchile.cl}
Abstract
This exercise introduces students to the topics of modeling and mixed-integer programming and motivates them to investigate and understand the complexity of day-to-day problems. The activity consists of putting together a sheet of a newspaper using news and advertising items taken from a real newspaper. The objective is to arrive at a layout that has the highest possible value subject to the constraints of space on the sheet and the correct orientation of the items. Thus, the exercise poses a problem of optimization.
The activity has all the necessary elements for use as an introduction to optimization and mixed-integer programming concepts, and it presents the students with a real-world situation that can also be seen as a game or competition. The enthusiasm this creates and the implicit difficulty of the actual problem motivate students to formalize the ideas involved and initiate a study of the basics of optimization techniques.
Key words
active learning; cases; teaching optimization; newspaper layout
History
Received: January 2011; accepted: August 2011.
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Citation Information
Devia, N., Weber, R. 2012. Teaching Note: Active learning exercise: Newspaper page layout. INFORMS Trans. Ed. 12(3) 153–156. Available online at http://ite.pubs.informs.org/.