Problem Generalization for Designing Recursive Algorithms

This paper focuses on the difficulty for university students to acquire, within computational thinking, the skills to solve certain problems through recur sion. The acquisition of this type of reasoning is essential to understand the dif ferent problem solving techniques that are based on recursive algorithms, such as divide and conquer or dynamic programming. Therefore, first, the generalization of problems is proposed as a strategy for designing recursive algorithms. As a second step, that generalization is formalized through a specification sheet that contains different fields that correspond to the characteristics that are relevant to solve a problem recursively.