Splash ABC offers high-quality education resources across the curriculum. There are video clips, digital books, educational games from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) and other media companies around the world. These multimedia resources can enrich teachers’ class activities and help with their lesson plans. Although some educational games are included in Splash ABC, most of the resources are not for interactive purpose. After all, teachers may find this website resourceful.
In this brief report, I will also focus on the same topic, the “Exponential Functions”, as I did in the review of Desmos.com so that we can have some comparisons.
How can teachers use this website?
As for the topic of exponential functions, maths teachers can locate it through the navigation bar and find the resource “Exponential Growth and Doubling Time”. There are three subtopics – compound interest, population growth and doubling time, and bacteria growth and decay. In each of these subtopics, a video introduction was provided, followed by a detailed description of the content and a suggested teaching procedure. And one to two spreadsheets can be downloaded from the website.
According to the NSW maths syllabus, maths teachers should include the practical application of exponential functions in their classes. However, it is difficult to find the appropriate resources. Some contents are beyond students’ cognitive levels; some contents need recent data, which are not accessible to teachers. The resources provided in Splash ABC can largely solve this problem. They are designed especially for the Australian curriculum, fitting well in the Australian social and cultural settings, and including the up-to-the-date data in the spreadsheets for educational use.
Take the subtopic “population growth and doubling time” as an example to illustrate how teachers can use this website.
- Show the video clip “what will the world population be in 2050?” (Behind the News [BTN], 2014) in class to demonstrate its relevance to exponential functions.
- After a further introduction, students can be paired to use the spreadsheet “populations 1950-2010”, but teachers’ instruction should be given in advance.
- Ask students to report how they find the appropriate models for each country. Ask students to report their findings of the population growth to the whole class.
- Introduce the notion of “doubling time” with the aide of the spreadsheet “Rule of 70” and ask students to think about the algebraic reasons of the rule (it is an advanced question, not for every student).
Pros:
- Well-designed interface. Teachers can easily find the resources that they need.
- Succinct instructions are given in each spreadsheet. Brief teaching plans are given on the website.
- High-quality multimedia resources are available for educational use.
Cons:
- The maths topics covered in Splash ABC are limited.
Maths for us 