What this pack is, and what it is not
The IB guide asks for these techniques to be practised inside the topics that need them, so this is not a taught unit of the course and does not claim to be one. It is reference and remedial material for a technique every topic assumes: it supplements integrated teaching rather than replacing it. It works in the first weeks of the course, before the first practical, and again as revision before the internal assessment, and it is the pack to hand a student who is losing marks on precision rather than on physics.

This pack is worked, not taught: the two hours quoted is student working time across the practice bank, not classroom delivery time. It sits comfortably as two sittings of about an hour, breaking between Practice A and Practice B, where the task changes from rounding to a stated precision to deciding what the precision should be. Measured against the bank as authored, the rules and worked examples take about 20 minutes together, Practice A about 45, Practice B about 25 and Practice C about 30.

What students learn
Counting significant figures and decimal places.
Rounding, in one step.
Reading the answer back.
Precision in a calculation.
Stating a processed value honestly.

IB skills this pack teaches and practises
Expressing a quantity to an appropriate number of significant figures or decimal places (taught).
Basic arithmetic and algebraic calculation (practised).
Using and interpreting scientific notation (practised).

What’s in the pack
Student Worksheet (15 pages)
Teacher Key (23 pages)
The editable worksheet

Written against the IB DP Physics guide (first assessment 2025) at both Standard and Higher Level; every skill it drills is common to the two, so one pack serves a mixed class. It declares no topic and no understanding, deliberately: significant figures belong to the IB skills in the study of physics (Tool 3: Mathematics) rather than to any one syllabus topic. SI units and IB notation are used throughout, and IB command terms (state, calculate, determine, explain) are used as an examiner uses them. The worksheet is a self-contained HTML file that opens in any modern browser with nothing to install, and it is fully editable, so the values, the tables and the extension conditions can be adapted to your class. This complete pack is offered free as a sample of the premium YPhysics IB DP Physics catalogue: use it, set it, and explore the paid resources that carry the course forward. Suitable for ages 16–19 as homework, as a first-week reference, as remedial support for a student losing marks on technique, or as revision before the internal assessment.