The King and Prisoner Puzzle: A Way of Introducing the Components of Logical Structures

The purpose of this paper is to provide issues related to student understanding of logical components that arise when solving word problems. We designed a logic problem called the King and Prisoner Puzzle - a linguistically simple, yet logically challenging problem. In this paper, we describe various student solutions to the puzzle and discuss the issues with students’ logic. In particular, it is thought-provoking that invalid arguments in students’ solutions to the puzzle are based on a lack of precise understanding of some basic logical components. This emphasizes the necessity of additional teaching to form mutual understanding of the meaning of the logical components.