How do I approach inductive design problems with no information or context given?
Most questions in AI textbooks of this style are intended to be open ended so that the student can experiment on its own with the problem. So the golden rule is do as you see fit to provide the best learning!

In particular for this problem, your approach seems appropriate.

Since most sorting algorithms fall into a divide and conquer schema, you won't have problem fitting it into an inductive schema.

For example, you could take quicksort, which is usually implemented recursively. And then prove that it indeed sorts an array of size $n$ assuming that it sorts an array of size less than $n$.