A CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS

 They said the chance of rain today was 30%. So how come it rained?

Your unborn child has a high risk of having Downs Syndrome. Amniocentesis has a one is a hundred chance of aborting the foetus. What do you do?

I am investing all my cash in dot com shares. I'll make a killing!

HIV? Why me? I only had unprotected sex once!

My home was washed away in the floods last year. I rebuilt it on the same spot - no way can it flood here again.

Fortune favours the brave.

Was it Lonnis' faith…or Janice's prayers… or my system… that won the $15,283,800 jackpot? I think it was the combination of all three. (Gail Howard's Smart Luck Products 1999)

www.planetqhe.com
I began working on this project in April 1999 as a graduate student at the University of Bristol, England as part of the main study of my M Ed dissertation. My work so far focuses on solving counter-intuitive problems with the methods of probability outlined in the Group 5 subjects. My plans for the site extend further than mathematics however. I want to widen the scope of this site to involve other subjects, creating a rich cross-curricular resource for IB students based around the concept of 'Chance' and eventually publish the entire resource on the web. As far as I am aware, this would be an original work. A few colleges in the USA and one in New Zealand have on-line probability courses and several math enthusiasts have published isolated activities, but there is no cohesive, dedicated unit for IB schools. The cross-curricular dimension makes it even more exciting - and unique?
The content of the site should recognise the many situations where humans have to answer not only the fundamental questions of "How many?" or "How much?" but "How Likely?" and aim to deepen students' understanding and competence in the probabilistic domain. Immediately one can see that the world of chance is wider than the study of the mathematical methods created to quantify the likeliness of outcomes. To restrict study to this area alone would marginalize many 'real-world' applications, not to mention the examination of the way chance is represented in our language, habits and societies. However, at the moment I am limiting curriculum areas to Mathematics, English, Humanities and Science. My ISJ article examines an attempt at an IB Maths-Genetics application, and while I think that many more collaborative projects with other subjects are possible, it's probably best to start small. As with some of the best educational websites, hopefully P-L-A-Net will grow and evolve over time with careful nurturing and editorial care!
IST teachers will have the first opportunity to contribute before I ask for contributions through the web. To give the curriculum cohesion and purpose, I am trying to create a set of essential questions.

Framing the www.planetqhe.com curriculum around a set of essential questions:
Essential questions are a crucial driver for teaching and learning. They engage the students in the study and create a bridge between performance-based activities and deeper, conceptual understandings (Erickson, 1998)
Essential questions serve to unify and revitalize our curriculum work no matter whether the option in discipline-based, interdisciplinary, student-centred or setting-centred. (Jacobs, 1999)
Jacobs gives the following example of three essential questions adopted by English, science and humanities teachers for an interdisciplinary unit on The Origins of the Species:

· What are the different views of the origins of human beings?
· How have these views reflected contemporary values and events over time?
· What are the current views on the origin of the species?

Here are some back of an envelope sketch proposals for essential questions for www.planetqhe.com. The intention is to shape them into a set of three or four essential questions. At the moment, some of them are just 'starters' for philosophical debate and focus on a fairly wide area of study:

1. What is 'luck'?
2. What is the biggest risk you have taken today? This year? In your life? When and why do we "leave it to chance"?
3. What would a world without risk be like?
4. What are the different ways in which humans cope with chance?
5. How have these 'methods' reflected the contemporary values and events over time and across different cultures?
6. What are the current developments in the human reaction to the world of chance?
7. Where does risk come into our daily lives? Is the way we perceive/react to risk independent of context?
8. How much do you know about the risks that are 'managed' for you by governments and other organisations and of the 'methods' they use?
9. What is meant by the terms independent events and cause and effect? How are they related?
10. "It's a small world" - discuss.

What can I do?
There are three things you can do at this stage:
· Give me your ideas for a manageable area of focus, possibly with your own subject in mind, that fits with the aims of the www.planetqhe.com project.
· Give me the essential questions that you feel would map this area of focus into a unit of IB study. (This would require us to sit down and examine our schemes of work in the long term)
· Alternatively, please give me any ideas you have for a simpler model in which just two subjects collaborate on a probabilistic topic, as in my Maths-Genetics pilot study.

Cheers!

DAVID HARRIS, TOULOUSE September 2000

© David Kay Harris 1999-2003