Spies, Lies, and Codes

ASSESSMENTS

To see if goals are being reached, a series of assessments such as presentations, tests, and classroom assessment techniques will be given.  Each type of assessment will provide written feedback, which can be kept for future reference.  The feedback will gauge students’ level of understanding as well as misconceptions.  Thus, the level of difficulty of the lessons can be changed to meet the needs of the students.

First type of assessment, presentations, will allow students to incorporate history, writing, and public speaking with mathematics.  Presentations include researching, writing up a summary of the research, and giving a five minute presentation with visuals.  This will accommodate students whose main strengths do not lie in mathematics, but like doing research, writing, or doing public speaking.  Tests will monitor students’ level of understanding.  Questions on the test will vary from multiple choice questions, true/false questions to free-response questions.  The type of questions varies to accommodate different learning styles.  Feedback from the test will see whether students are about to encode and decode messages as well as differentiate between the various encryption methods.  Other types of assessments are classroom assessment techniques such as probing background knowledge, filling in productive study time logs, developing concept maps, and documenting step-by-step solutions to problems are assessments will gauge students’ level of understanding.  These assessments are just a few types of assessments that are included in our unit project.

Students will be required to create a demonstration poster for their final presentations.  These posters should include what type of encryption the students have chosen, the math behind it, and where all this sort of encryption can be used.  The posters should have both text and graphics, be visually pleasing, and convey a great deal of information quickly and concisely.

Final Presentation Rubric