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.