- This idea is built around Wiggins' and McTighe's Understanding by Design methodology where "each big idea is introduced with an essential question."
- In this paper, Touretzky's outlines seven big ideas and corresponding questions for teaching a one semester upper level computer science course in robotics. One such example is as follows: "Big idea: Robots use sophisticated but imperfect computer vision algorithms to deduce real world object representations from arrays of pixels," Essential Question:"'How do robots see the world?'"
- Such discussions should expose students to advanced computer science concepts and encourage them to want to learn more.