The tasks often relate to problems that students encounter in their lives or communities.
Students have an active role in formulating, designing, and managing the tasks.
The tasks build on mathematically interesting questions or problems that students themselves have raised. The tasks involve nonroutine problems - that is, there is no way to specify in advance how to solve the problems and there are many ways in which the problems may be solved. The issues and problems involved in the tasks can be viewed from multiple perspectives, so that they require nuance judgment and decisionmaking. The tasks contain concepts or themes that are rich enough to be explored over a substantial period of time, from a week to an entire school year or beyond. The tasks generate new knowledge and products and often have spinoffs into other projects.