Friday Five for May 20

Our theme this week is sketch. Each activity uses our newest Activity Builder feature in creative ways! Read on and click through to explore.

Building Polynomials

This is an update of an activity—also called Building Polynomials, brought to us by Jami—that has been in our search pool for a while now. We added a couple of sketch screens this week. Take a look at both of them and let’s chat on Twitter or on your blog about whether and how these two activities are meaningfully different experiences.

Lesson Study, anyone? Ping us with your thoughts, please.

Here is the original Building Polynomials without sketch.

And the new Building Polynomials with sketch.

Home Run Kings

Another modeling gem from Michael Fenton. Use historical home-run hitting greats to make predictions for the young swatter Bryce Harper. This one is good for statistics or early algebra; it requires no equation expertise.

Polygons on the Coordinate Plane

In this adaptation of a sixth-grade CPM activity, students use sketch to indicate base and height of an oddly-oriented triangle on the coordinate plane. This is a really useful tool for assessing students’ ability to see these important attributes of triangles.

The Two-Hour Marathon

The Friday Five was enjoying a cup of coffee and reading the New York Times this past Sunday, and stumbled on a fascinating sports medicine article with a killer graph. The only problem was that the graph did all the cool math modeling. So it has been Desmos-ified. We stripped away the math that someone else did, and left behind an interesting and challenging story about a runner, a scientist, and a whole lot of miles of railroad. Algebra 1 students and beyond should have the tools to learn something useful here.

Sketchy Lines

This activity lives for screens 7 and 8, which are wonderful, ambiguous conversation starters. Fans of Which One Doesn’t Belong? will feel right at home, albeit in a new format. This is a great activity for anyone studying the algebra of lines