Des-blog

Let’s say you’ve chosen an engaging lesson to use with your students, and now you’re sitting down to plan your instruction. You know you have a context that will make sense to your students, and you know the questions that arise in that context will be both challenging and productive. You’re hoping to launch the task to engage students with the context and with an understanding of what mathematical question they’ll be answering through their work, then give them time to work collaboratively, and finally bring them together to share strategies, formalize methods, and introduce or refine any relevant vocabulary.

How might you get them started in this context? How might you launch your lesson?

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There are things in life that science teachers and math teachers disagree on. Is 0.1 equal to 0.10? Do all numbers require units? Is a ratio different from a rate?

But there is one thing that math and science teachers can always agree on—teaching scientific notation is a strangely difficult thing to do.

Desmos isn’t here to tell you that we’ve solved this problem, but we are here to tell you that we’ve built a thing that makes this difficult thing a bit more fun.

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My colleague Sean Sweeney suggested a post on time-saving tips in Activity Builder, to share with all who work with this tool. So I put out a quick call to the rest of my colleagues, and the result is the following list.

If you’re a regular user of Activity Builder, I hope there is something new for you on the list, just as there was for me.

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