No, its one way of motivating a student to re-invent (and thereby learn) or to apply (and thereby learn) a solution. But if the student doesn’t ever get the sol

No, its one way of motivating a student to re-invent (and thereby learn) or to apply (and thereby learn) a solution. But if the student doesn’t ever get the solution, they don’t ever learn it. It is possible for someone to face a problem for decades, to care* deeply about it, for others to succeed at it, and for them to not know how to find a workable answer. For me, happens for “obvious” problems like “how do I learn to how to estimate how long software takes to write?” or “How do I write a first draft of a letter to a friend?” where the answer people have is “just do it” or “just do it and multiply by 2”. ——— * By “care” about it, I mean feel the emotion of wanting a solution. Some people define “care” such that if someone fails at something it means they didn’t care about it. I’m not using that definition.