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2nd Annual Desmos Global Math Art Contest

Banner with the text Desmos Global Art Contest 2021

Update as of February 4, 2022:

Thank you to the more than 10,000 participants from around the world who participated in the second annual Desmos Global Art Contest! The winners and finalists were chosen from countless examples of incredible effort, artistry, ingenuity, and creativity.

View the 2021 winners

Did you know the Desmos Graphing Calculator is a fantastic tool for making art? Using only graphed mathematical expressions, people around the world have created awe-inspiring masterpieces, from geometric patterns and architectural scenes to self-portraits, renderings of famous paintings, and beyond.

Three artistic graphs- a little clock with a bubbly drink and a little plant, a portrait of Marilyn Monroe made entirely of polygons, and a 3-D rendering of an airplane, together with a peek at some of the equations that generated them.

After the huge success of our 2020 Global Math Art Contest, featuring over 4,000 graphs from over 100 countries, we had to bring it back! Everyone from around the world can submit their entries for the 2nd Annual Desmos Global Math Art Contest and win prizes for their hard work. This year, we added more ways to submit and a category for ages 19+.

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Rewriting Our List of Mathematicians

When using Desmos activities, we want students to feel comfortable sharing their ideas with the teacher and the class. To support this, teachers can turn on anonymize mode swapping students’ names with the names of notable mathematicians.

Though our list of mathematician names was originally created for student safety, it is also a way we publicly amplify particular figures. By its nature, this list serves as a commentary on who is regarded as a mathematician. With that in mind, we recently inspected our list of names and chose to overhaul it. This blog post explains what prompted a change and how we crafted a new list.

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The Desmos Guide to Building Great (Digital) Math Activities v2.0

Desmos wants to help every student learn math and love learning math. To accomplish that goal, we build math activities for students, and we build them to the specifications in this document.

Our design code folds in our collective understanding of mathematics, identity, culture, curriculum, cognition, and pedagogy. Together, these ideas can increase the likelihood that a student will come to identify themselves as a “math person.”1

We intend this document to be descriptive of choices we have already made and prescriptive for choices we will make in the future. When we have doubts about our design decisions, we use this document to settle them. We share these principles publicly in case they’re of use to you and, especially, so you’ll hold us accountable if we fail to meet them.

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