IB Mathematics HL: Vectors & Planes

There’s nothing big to report here, but I did want to share a really successful approach I put together relating vectors and planes. This is a required topic for the IB HL Mathematics curriculum. All of the textbooks I looked in did a fairly theoretical analysis of Cartesian and vector forms for planes from the start. I wanted to present a lesson that gave students a bit more intuition about the concepts involved, and then get to the mathematical vocabulary when needed.

Vectors and Planes

These notes were created live during class using OneNote. I don’t intend these notes to replace the textbook, but I do want them to serve as the ‘residue of logic’ that we used during the lesson so that students can go back and review them to remember the key ideas. I have a small group, so we can sit around a big table and work together. There’s lots of conversation between us and between students when I set them loose to do an exercise.

All of the students demonstrated good understanding throughout the lesson in the problems I gave. The students that did the homework immediately after the lesson did well on a subsequent quiz. The student that didn’t, well, didn’t. No surprise there.

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