On: Stepping into math: Open-sourcing our step-by-step...

[webmaven]

> Knowing how to get the answer in a problem with easy numbers is not the point.

So, don't use easy numbers?

> I give the students nice numbers and in exchange they are expected to tell me a general way of solving that type of problem.

If this quid-pro-quo is explicit, that seems fair. But I still don't see why "nice numbers" are necessary.

[yequalsx → webmaven]

In this case nice numbers are not necessary. In other types of problems they are. One does not want to burden students with needlessly complicated calculations when the main point is a simple one.