Like most secondary schools, we have designed a bridging course to help our students prepare for A Level mathematics.
With the support of IDEMS International a not-for-profit community interest company the teachers at the Lycee and the SAMI team have been able to deliver part of the course via a cutting edge online assessment package for mathematics called STACK.
We have agreed to make the course freely available to any student who would like to enroll and would like to work with teachers across the country to ensure it meets their school’s needs. We recognise that there is room for improvement, so constructive critical feedback would be very welcome as we are continuously making adjustments. The course design means that students can complete it over a 5-6 week period. Schools may want to use it during what remains of term time, or as summer homework before September. The open course has recently been launched and students can self enroll and start taking part whenever they are ready.
Our PAL students have just finished Week 2 of the course and it is going brilliantly. I’m so excited by what we have achieved. Our students will be able to start next year with confidence and they have been given a chance to prove to me that they are suitable for the A-level.
The course is a series of units, each containing:
- a number of STACK Quizzes of the essential topics at GCSE with some extensions to prepare students for A-Level
- a Fun Maths activity to inspire students and help them discover interesting aspects of Mathematics
- an exploration on GeoGebra
- a Modelling task to give students a taste of applied mathematics related to some A-level topics
- an optional Challenge that will give students a bit more to think about, which particularly targets students thinking about Further Maths A-Level.
The open version of this course is now available here for students to enroll or for teachers to check out. Teachers who would like a similar course to use privately with their class or school, or who would like personalised content, should contact Santiago Borio. IDEMS have the capacity to support up to 10 schools and will do so freely on a first-come-first-served basis to contribute to continued mathematics education in these difficult times.
Do contact Santiago or Emily Fleming [email protected] directly if you’d like more information. If any teachers would like to collaborate to further develop these open educational resources we would be delighted to hear from you.
About STACK
STACK has huge advantages over other online assessment systems as it was particularly defined for formative assessment and the questions in the course were specifically written to detect common misconceptions and give automatic relevant feedback to students. Also, students can attempt quizzes multiple times with new variations of questions generated with each new try. Finally, each unit has some really nice questions that help students develop higher order skills, for example questions where students have to create their own examples for specific situations.
We encourage you to examine STACK’s capabilities by enroling in the open course as a student, and trying it.
For those short on time, here are some examples that demonstrate the capabilities of STACK.
- Specific feedback that recognises mistakes:
or
- Multi-part questions that have follow through marks:
- Higher Order skills questions:
or
Enroling on the course
The course is a moodle based, so to get started please ecampus.idems.international/mathsbridging, and click on “Log in” in the top right corner.
Then on the next screen you get the option to create a new account:
After creating a new account you will see this message
confirm your email address by clicking on the link in the email sent to you.
You should then see this page:
Click continue, and you will see this page:
Click on Courses on the left hand menu, then Open Courses, then “Maths Bridging course GCSE to A-level”.
Scroll to the bottom left and click “Enrol me in this course”
You will now be enrolled on the course and able to start week 1.