Updates to VCE General Mathematics overviews (v0.2.0)
Changes ahoy! part 2
The first major update to my VCE Mathematics overviews is now also here General! See here for the first major update to Methods and Specialist!
Below I’ll highlight some of the bigger changes I’ve made, but there are changelogs included in the pdfs for a list of the more granular changes.
If you have thoughts or questions or just want to chat about them, reach out on Substack, on socials (Twitter/X, Bluesky, LinkedIn), or via email.
Some changes have been applied across the board, so I’ll go through them first.
To improve navigation, I’ve added links to topics and sections within the document, including a proper front cover.
Given the detail these “overviews” have spiralled into, I’ve added some more summary-esque pages including a major themes page to highlight what the foci are for the study and topic-by-topic core ideas of what should be the major takeaways from them so that they don’t get drowned out by the minutia.
To keep track of what changes, I’ve included changelogs by version to track changes.
A number of corrections have been made as they were found.
General Mathematics overview
First and foremost, there has been a large rewrite of the entire overview. This brings it more in line with the style of the Methods and Specialist overviews that get more down to the minutia of what is required and uses a lot less indented points.
This has meant several subtopics have been broken up into more subtopics for clearer separation of the major beats of the topics.1
I’ve added a new subtopic on responsible consumption and driving that uses ratios, rates, and percentages with dosages, alcohol, energy from food and used by exercise, and stopping distances based on content in other states curricula/syllabuses. I’ve also intentionally kept it at the start of unit 1 so that even if students opt to drop General Mathematics early, they’ll go through that subtopic and hopefully come away with some senses of being responsible with the things they will be getting more exposed to at that age. To do this, I’ve had to introduce each part in quite small steps to build up to what would otherwise be the formulas used so that it fits in properly and isn’t arbitrary algebra.
Click here to see the latest General Mathematics overview.
For the future
There are still some issues I have with the sequencing, mostly around matrices and networks where a number of matrix applications pre-empt undirected and directed, unweighted and weighted graphs before you introduce them properly in a later unit or topic.
Unit 4 would be easier to get away with swapping the matrices and networks topics around, apart from them then appearing reversed in the exams. But they’re spread across units 1 and 2 which is a harder issue to solve (where I’m trying to keep things in their appropriate unit as much as possible).2
I would like to include a subtopic or something that pulls all the content together for a machine learning application, but that still needs a lot of work to figure out. If you have ideas or thoughts on this, reach out.
I’m thinking about fleshing out the assessment details as proper sections with ideas of what that needs to or could include, especially for the required SACs in units 3&4 and the mathematical investigations.
I’ll also look into spinning it out into state specific versions starting with the closer variants of the AC v8.4 and VCE (QLD, WA, Tas) given their broad similarity to each other. I’ve already made some steps toward that in this version.
and page fitting
Only exception I’ve made is bringing forward scientific notation and significant figures from unit 2 since you ideally need them for rounding.