Abstract
The current curricular documents in the Czech Republic and Slovakia focus the education at all levels towards the acquisition of key competencies that would allow the students to understand the situations they will encounter in their professional and personal lives and resolve them in adequate ways. However, the results of national and international investigations show that there hasn't been much success in achieving this goal.
For this reason, the publication starts from the point of analysis of the "competency" term and the ways to acquire them. It is clear that students acquire these target abilities gradually, mainly based on their own activities, carried mainly by adequate problems.
For these reasons, the authors focused on the characteristics of such problems and on their own creation of complex problems in order to develop students' skills, and subsequently to acquire the required competencies. The problems so created were verified in the school practice and the results of the verification prove their benefits for the development of required student competencies.