Saturday, February 4, 2012

Intro to IB Type 1 Task

I pulled together a Prezi for introducing to my students the necessary elements of the IB internal assessment Type 1 task. In the IB program, the kids have to do two portfolio assignments, each of a very different nature. I personally enjoy looking over the tasks, because they involve doing very rich mathematics. What I don't enjoy is that the kids have to do these difficult tasks alone at home and that similar tasks are not built into the rest of the IB Math curriculum.

Anyway, different from Type 2 tasks (which involve modeling a real-world set of data with different function types, choosing the most appropriate function based on end behavior, and justifying the choice based on the context of the data), Type 1 tasks involve looking for and generalizing patterns. Last time I was able to find some great resources (vodcasts) for introducing the kids to Type 2 tasks, but this time I did not find parallel resources for Type 1 tasks. So, I pulled together a Prezi and when I have time over the summer, I'll flesh out another presentation in similar format, going through one specific example task.

Here is the Prezi, if you are an IB teacher and are interested in possibly using it in your class. To walk myself through the steps of the IB Task 1, I have looked at 4 different recent tasks: the stellar numbers, the infinite surds, logarithm bases (if log(X)/log(a) = c, log(X)/log(b) = d, what is log(X)/log(ab) in terms of c and d?), and a problem involving matrices. All four are drastically different in terms of the mathematical content they use, but I think they are all excellent applications of IB topics, just at a fairly sophisticated level. I have to really think about how to incorporate pieces of them better into my classroom in order to enrich student learning consistently and to reinforce their algebra skills!

No comments:

Post a Comment