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Finding Associations #Desmosify

Welcome to a series of posts sharing how we #Desmosify the curriculum from Open Up Resources/Illustrative Mathematics. You can use this lesson for free, or sign up to get many more activities just like it in our core middle school curriculum!

Here’s how we #Desmosified an Open Up Resources/IM lesson to help students find associations in data..

Desmosification #1: Estimate, then calculate.

Two-way tables are a powerful way to represent data from the world. Associations that were invisible in a one-way table suddenly pop to the surface under the bright light of the two-way table, like the association between gender, age, and survival on the Titanic.

A two-way table.

At Desmos, we try as often as possible to start with a student’s concrete and contextual knowledge before inviting them to develop more abstract and mathematical knowledge. Once a curriculum digests a context into numbers, certain contextual questions like “what do you think?” become harder to ask. So we chose to start this investigation without numbers, inviting as much contextual thinking from students as possible.

The two-way table without numbers.

An advantage of the digital medium over print is that we can always add the numbers later.

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Tortoise and the Hare #Desmosify

Welcome to a series of posts sharing how we #Desmosify the curriculum from Open Up Resources/Illustrative Mathematics. You can use this lesson for free, or sign up to get many more activities just like it in our core middle school curriculum!

Here’s how we #Desmosified an Open Up Resources/IM lesson to help students students interpret graphs of functions..

Desmosification #1: Create concrete connections.

In the original activity, Open Up Resources/Illustrative Mathematics starts with a context about temperature. We’re on board!

The original temperature graph.

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Shira the Sheep #Desmosify

Welcome to a series of posts sharing how we #Desmosify the curriculum from Open Up Resources/Illustrative Mathematics. You can use this lesson for free, or sign up to get many more activities just like it in our core middle school curriculum!

Here’s how we #Desmosified an Open Up Resources/IM lesson to help students learn to solve inequalities..

Desmosification #1: Create concrete connections.

In the original lesson we #Desmosified, Open Up Resources/Illustrative Mathematics invites students to complete a series of exercises like the one below.

The original task.

These exercises are likely to give students valuable experience with the subtleties of inequalities. The examples include inequalities that are strict and inclusive, inequalities that include negative and positive values, etc.

We worried, however, that students would spend too much time filling in tables to notice those subtleties. We also wanted to connect the solution of inequalities to a representation that’s more concrete for students than tables.

Enter Shira the Sheep!

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