It will likely surprise no one that the Friday Fave is a big fan of Which One Doesn’t Belong?— that simple adaptation of an old Sesame Street routine, updated to offer students an environment for noticing a wide variety of properties, and to use the properties to discuss sameness and difference, and to begin asking new mathematical questions.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FClGhto1vIg
In Activity Builder, we have made it easy to build your own Which One Doesn’t Belong? sets using multiple choice images and graphs. Get a new screen, select the multiple choice component, and insert four graphs or images as the choices.
We’ll put them in a two-by-two array and ask students for an explanation.
In the dashboard, you’ll see how many students made each selection, and the explanations they offered. Having gotten these initial informal ideas from your students, you can take the conversation from there!
Of course, there are several activities on teacher.desmos.com that incorporate Which One Doesn’t Belong? screens, including Commuting Times (which scatter plot doesn’t belong?), and Inequalities on the Number Line (which inequality doesn’t belong?) And what is Polygraph besides a giant game of Which One Doesn’t Belong?
Whether you make your own Which One Doesn’t Belong? sets, use some you find on the internet and build them in Activity Builder, or use existing activities that incorporate them, know that Desmos wholeheartedly endorses this use of multiple choice!
Creating space for students to notice important features of mathematical objects whether they know the formal words for those properties or not, this is what makes Which One Doesn’t Belong?—and image-based multiple choice in general—this week’s Friday Fave!