Friday 17 February 2012

Good Problems: My rubric

In my last post I mentioned my plan to make arhcaeology based maths lessons. In doing so I tried to create a rubric to make it clearer in my mind what I was trying to achieve. Now that I have the at least the skeleton of my series of lessons, I felt it would be important to revisit these and I'm sharing them here mostly just to remind myself what I wrote.

Good problems should be:
  • Realistic: Not contrived. Should be a problem that someone in the profession might actually face and solve using a similar method to ours.
  • Intuitive: Have multiple entry points and opportunities for students to use their prior knowledge on the problem.
  • Visual: Multimedia used to give context of profession and add believability.
  • Extendable: Has follow-up problems and ideas for further reseach for those interested.
  • Vital: Mathematical skills used are necessary for the problem.
  • 1st Act: Problem should be able to be introduced in a viceral way, with no maths involved.
Other desirable properties:
  • Unexpected: An area that pupils would not think is particularly mathematical.
  • Personalisable: Problem can incorporate data from a company or organisation.

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