Friday Fave for January 11

The Friday Fave is working to stave off the mid-winter blues by thinking about delight.

At Desmos, one of our core values is Design for delight. So when we built Penny Circle, we made the pennies bounce off each other, and we made them non-identical.

An animation shows pennies being dragged into a circle. They bump into each other as though they were real pennies.

We made a robot celebrate your mathematical victories in Adding Whole Numbers

An animation shows playing cards being dragged onto two different mats on a table, with the goal of getting the sum of the cards to be the same on both mats. 7 and 6 go on one mat; 8, 2, and 3 go on the other. The robot scans the cards and throws up its arms to celebrate the student's success.

And we made Marbleslides, where you can launch your marbles into the air and through the stars.

An animation shows marbles being launched on a graph; they drop, roll along several graphed lines, through stars that serve as targets, and then down off the bottom of the screen

Of course, we don’t delude ourselves that the electronic world is the primary source of delight in classrooms. We understand and celebrate that there is delight in a clever new student solution, in persistence paying off, and in just connecting to each other as human beings in a shared community. But isn’t it lovely when electronic math lessons bring a spark of delight too?

Delight. This week’s Friday Fave. Find it in lots of places at teacher.desmos.com, including these activities:

Adding Whole Numbers

Marbleslides: Lines

Coin Capture

Transformation Golf: Rigid Motion