Desmos + Two Truths and a Lie

I’m absolute junk in the kitchen (Dan Meyer speaking) but I’m trying to improve. I marvel at the folks who go off recipe, creating delicious dishes by sight and feel. That’s not me right now. But I’m also not content simply to chop vegetables for somebody else.

I love the processes in the middle – like seasoning and sautéing. I can use that process in lots of different recipes, extending it in lots of different ways. It’s the right level of technical challenge for me right now.

In the same way, I’m enamored lately of instructional routines. These routines are sized somewhere between the routine administrative work of taking attendance and the non-routine instructional work of facilitating an investigation or novel problem. Just like seasoning and sautéing, they’re broadly useful techniques, so every minute I spend learning them is a minute very well spent.

For example, Estimation 180 is an instructional routine that helps students develop their number sense in the world. Contemplate then Calculate helps students understand the structure of a pattern before calculating its quantities. Which One Doesn’t Belong helps students understand how to name and argue about the names of mathematical objects.

I first encountered the routine “Two Truths and a Lie” in college when new, nervous freshmen would share two truths about themselves and one lie, and other freshmen would try to guess the lie.

Marian Small and Amy Lin adapted that icebreaker into an instructional routine in their book More Good Questions. I heard about it from Jon Orr and yesterday we adapted that routine into our Challenge Creator technology at Desmos.

We invite each student to create their own object – a circle graph design in primary; a parabola in secondary.

We ask the student to write three statements about their object – two that are true, and one that is a lie. They describe why it’s a lie.

Here are three interesting statements from David Petro’s circle graph design. Which is the lie?

The shaded part is the same area as the non shaded part.
If these were pizzas, there is a way for three people to get the same amount when divided.
If you double the image you could make a total of 5 shaded circles.

And three from Sharee Herbert’s interesting parabola. Which is the lie?

The axis of symmetry is y=-2.
The y-intercept is negative.
The roots are real.

Then we put that thinking in a box, tie a bow around it, and slide it into your class gallery.

The teacher encourages the students to use the rest of their time to check out their classmates’ parabolas and circle graphs, separate lies from truth, and see if everybody agrees.

Our experience with Challenge Creator is that the class gets noisy, that students react to one another’s challenges verbally, starting and settling mathematical arguments at will. It’s beautiful.

So feel free to create a class and use these with your own students: