IB DP Physics skill pack: adding and subtracting vectors, SL and HL, first assessment 2025. It drills tip to tail, scale diagrams and components. 35 answered questions over 44 student pages.
The IB guide wants students to practise this technique inside the topics that need it. So this pack is not a unit of the course. Use it as reference and catch-up material beside that teaching. It suits a class that adds two forces on one line but stops dead when the second is at an angle.
This pack is worked, not taught. The 285 minutes it takes is student working time, not teaching time. Split it into seven sittings of about 40 minutes. The Teacher Key says where each one ends.
The pack assumes right-angled trigonometry. A short recap covers resolving into components. A companion skill pack teaches it in full.
What students learn
- Drawing a vector to scale, and reading a magnitude back off one
- Adding along one line with signs, and at right angles with Pythagoras and the inverse tangent
- Placing vectors tip to tail, the parallelogram, and the range a resultant of two vectors can take
- Subtracting by adding the reverse, including a change in velocity
- Up to three vectors at any angles: resolve, add along each direction, recombine
Six rule cards, each with an example to work in class, then three worked examples. Practice A: nine fluency items. Practice B: ten applied items. Practice C: four multiple-choice items and three exam-style questions. The pack has 213 marks and 19 figures. Students draw three constructions with a ruler and protractor on printed grids.
IB skills (Tool 3: Mathematics). Taught: adding and subtracting vectors in the same plane; constructing and using scale diagrams; drawing and labelling vectors. Practised: resolving vectors into perpendicular components; calculations with trigonometric ratios; arithmetic and algebra to solve problems.
What’s included
- Student Worksheet, 44 pages, colour and B&W
- Teacher Key, 56 pages, every question answered with marking guidance
- The editable worksheet, a self-contained HTML file
Worksheet and key come from one source file, so they always agree. The pack uses SI units and IB command terms throughout. It is tied to no syllabus topic, only to the IB skills in the study of physics. For grades 11-12 (ages 16-19).
Part of the A.2 Forces and Momentum Complete Unit Bundle, 30% off buying the packs separately.
Related resources:
- Resolving Vectors, the companion pack that takes a vector apart
- Resultant Force, Inertia and Newton’s First Law, where the resultant is put to work
- Foundations of Motion: Distance and Displacement, the free demo lesson
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