Having students create their own problems and work can lead to powerful engagement and motivation.

For the Quadratic Quandaries Performance Task, I find that students love the flexibility and creative room that the performance task allows. Although it can be difficult, I try to reach a good balance of clear expectations and flexibility for this task.

Student work shows the variety of not only topics, from Football Functions to Flappy Bird Rage, but also in terms of depth of understanding. Many projects had relatively straight forward quandaries (when does an object hit the ground, what is the maximum or minimum height that the object reaches, etc.), but some had complex questions, like the Volleyball Complex Question where the group found an interesting application of quadratic functions.

An important note to the student work in this reflection is it is a mix of groups from my advanced honors section and groups from my fundamentals section. I am continuing to try and design and implement more engaging and open-ended tasks like the Quadratic Quandaries Performance Task for ALL students.

Student Led Inquiry: Performance Tasks and Collaborative Work

Unit 7: Interpret and Build Quadratic Functions and Equations
Lesson 10 of 13

## Big Idea: Students complete a number of application problems related to quadratic functions and create their own Quadratic Quandary!

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90 minutes

### Jason Colombino

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