Every week or two during the fall, and at least a couple of times a week in the spring as we start getting close to the AP exam I have my students do a timed practice FRQ. They get a blank sheet that looks almost like what they’ll see in May and a PDF with the problem they’re working on. A 22:30 timer goes up on the board. It’s not a hard timer. They don’t have to be done by the time it runs to zero, but I do like the timer going to get used to the average pace they’ll need to be on to finish the exam. In May they’ll have 90 minutes to do 4 FRQs, and a quarter of 90 is 22:30.
Sure, Google makes it pretty easy to throw a timer up on the board. But they’re pretty boring. First, I started a YouTube channel with timer videos, including 22:30 timers.
But that wasn’t customizable. It took a separate video for every duration. So over the Thanksgiving holiday I built a website where you can go and pick from a list of timers and set to any duration you want up to 24 hours.
The links below are a few examples, but there are quite a few more there. And the collection will just keep growing.
