How to Naturally Form Good Questions: Lessons from Modeling Competitions

The ability to ask questions is crucial, because without questions there can be no problem solving. Honestly, even as a teacher who wants students to ask more and better questions, I don’t feel very good at asking questions myself.

I have tried hard to pose questions by looking at trees by the road, cars, tall buildings, people walking, and changing clouds, asking myself what questions I could ask. I could ask “How tall is the tree?”, “How far is the building?”, “Walking speed?”, “Geometric structure of clouds?”, but they felt forced, questions for the sake of asking.

The questions we ask should be natural , not contrived.

Recently the 2022 HiMCM modeling competition and the International High School Modeling Competition (autumn) concluded, and I worked hard to solve the problems presented. For example, the HiMCM A problem required describing how bee populations change over time, while the B problem asked to predict future atmospheric CO₂ concentration from data.

Both problems are familiar: bees are common in nature, and many discussions link rising CO₂ to global warming. Yet I am not expert—how exactly does bee population vary over time? Can CO₂ concentration be predicted? What information does the current data provide? I was uncertain.

To address these questions, I consulted academic papers, blogs, official websites, and quickly learned a lot of new knowledge while also realizing how much I still didn’t know. With limited time, I had to balance solving the problems and learning. Many questions arose, some were answered, and new questions emerged as answers formed.

This experience seemed to reveal a “natural” way to pose questions: engage with new environments to broaden knowledge, and immerse oneself in solving problems, allowing new questions to arise during the process.

Engage with new environments, step out of your comfort zone, become a “newbie” in a new field, and naturally discover many knowledge gaps; simply articulating your confusion constitutes a question.

Delve deeply into solving a problem; the outcomes feed back on whether the result is ideal and the process sound, thereby generating questions that drive us to improve.

I also recall why participating in mathematical modeling contests is so attractive and rewarding: they deliberately force participants to choose a given topic and solve a problem that is likely unfamiliar yet must be answered. In doing so, participants actively expand their knowledge, refine their understanding, and experience the joy of problem solving while acquiring new knowledge.