Teaching Note—Active Learning Exercise: Newspaper Page Layout

This exercise introduces students to the topics of modeling and mixed-integer programming and motivates them to investigate and understand the complexity of day-to-day problems. The activity consists of putting together a sheet of a newspaper using news and advertising items taken from a real newspaper. The objective is to arrive at a layout that has the highest possible value subject to the constraints of space on the sheet and the correct orientation of the items. Thus, the exercise poses a problem of optimization.

The activity has all the necessary elements for use as an introduction to optimization and mixed-integer programming concepts, and it presents the students with a real-world situation that can also be seen as a game or competition. The enthusiasm this creates and the implicit difficulty of the actual problem motivate students to formalize the ideas involved and initiate a study of the basics of optimization techniques.