At Desmos, we’ve always looked to Google Docs (now Google Drive) for
inspiration. With Docs (Drive), the Google Team figured out how to take a few
ubiquitous and essential utilities and flip them on their head. Word
processing and spreadsheets belong in the browser, where they can be accessed
from anywhere, shared with a link, even edited collaboratively. As browsers
become ever more powerful, it just makes sense that these programs not be
locked in to specific devices or installed software.
We’ve long
felt that the Graphing Calculator was ripe for similar disruption. The
calculator of today looks exactly like it did in 1991, before Google or even
Netscape. In our opinion, that’s a both a travesty for math education and a
significant opportunity. We thus set out to re-imagine the calculator from the
ground up, a calculator that exposes the beauty of math, that would make math
fun instead of a chore, social instead of solitary. We imagined this
calculator living entirely in the browser, built on top of the best the web
has to offer. We spent months and months of late nights and early mornings and
launched the html5 calculator in January of this year.
Well, it
turns out that people wanted a better, more beautiful, more social calculator.
Since launching a few months ago, we’ve seen a growing stream of truly
inspiring graphs, from complicated math demos to beautiful drawings. Like this
graph of a dog, made by Amy, a high school senior:
https://www.desmos.com/calculator/m0pd3us3am
…or this graph of a space shuttle launch, built by
another high school senior, using over 273 separate equations:
https://www.desmos.com/calculator/if8aqbrqtc
Exciting to say the least. So when the Drive team reached
out to us about integrating, it was a no-brainer. Drive represents what we
believe to be the future of “files,” available in-browser on any device, and
synched seamlessly between machines. For all of us at Team Desmos, our launch
with Google Drive is a watershed moment, and the culmination of months of
effort toward a shared vision – software that is inherently social and not
tied to any device. This is an exciting time to be building web software, and
we couldn’t be more thrilled to be part of it.
https://www.desmos.com/calculator/wcgejbfyqj
