Grade 10 IDU May Onscreen Exam Progress Update
This week, our Grade 10 students dedicated all their science classes to thoroughly unpacking the upcoming Interdisciplinary Unit (IDU) exam, as outlined in the IB pre-release material. Together, we carefully explored the assessment expectations for all three interdisciplinary criteria (A, B, and C), ensuring students understand how they will be evaluated.
The central real-world issue of this IDU focuses on the rise of personal health monitoring technologies—such as smartwatches, glucose monitors, heart monitors, and smart scales. These devices collect large amounts of personal health data, leading to important discussions around privacy, security, and ethics, while also offering new ways to manage personal health. Through this unit, students are developing the ability to explain how these technologies work from a scientific perspective and to analyze how information about them is communicated in different types of texts. By combining these disciplinary insights, students are building critical thinking skills to weigh both the opportunities and risks of health tech, preparing them to make informed decisions as users and communicators in a tech-driven world.
In preparation, students have engaged deeply with a range of inquiry questions:
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Factual: Types of health monitoring devices, how sensors work, what data is collected and in what units, and features of different communication text types.
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Conceptual: How language shapes our view of technology, how different people value or worry about health tech, what drives development, and how communication can show purpose or bias. We also examined how advances like AI can impact fairness in healthcare.
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Debatable: Students discussed and researched questions such as whether the benefits of health tech outweigh privacy risks, who should access health data, how much control users should have, who is responsible when tech fails, and how governments or cultures might shape privacy standards.
Three formative tasks have supported students in researching, discussing, and answering these questions, giving them the tools and confidence to succeed in the upcoming exam. We are proud of their progress and wish them continued success as they prepare for this important assessment.
 