Holthouse likes to find what he calls “big, messy problems” for students to solve. “If I give my students a task or a problem that’s not relevant to their lives, they won’t get much out of the experience,” he says. Many of the best issues he finds for his students to solve come through the local community. For instance, when the village board needed to replace the signs in the city parks, they called Holthouse. His students got to work immediately using software to design new signs for the parks. Says one of his 11th grade students, Uriel, “Mr. Holthouse encourages us to be persistent and have the confidence to solve problems on our own.”