Des-blog

So let’s say you’ve been using the activities at teacher.desmos.com for a while now, and you decide you’re ready to start building your own activities from scratch.

Having sketched out the flow of the activity and made some decisions about what your students should be doing on each screen, you head to your Custom page, click “New Activity” and start building.

Maybe somewhere along the way, you end up building a complex screen—one that you want to modify and use in a different activity. Back in the old days, that meant you’d need to build the screen a second time.

But lucky for modern-day you, these aren’t the old days! Now you can copy that entire screen from one activity and paste it into another.

Your usual keyboard shortcut to copy; your usual keyboard shortcut to paste. Easy as Pi Day. That’s what makes screen-level copying and pasting this week’s Friday Fave.

We know that feedback is valuable. It is necessary for helping students improve rapidly. But not all feedback is created equal.

For example, consider evaluative feedback in which the student is told whether their response is right or wrong. In many circumstances, this can be frustrating and unhelpful—especially if the student is really struggling to understand a concept. In such cases, “wrong” may offer no guidance for improvement besides “guess again”.

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Computation Layer is the glue that holds complex Desmos activities together.

Like math, Computation Layer can be challenging to learn. Also like math, you can learn if you want to.

Here at Desmos, we’ve got plenty of resources to support you in that journey.

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