Des-blog

Earlier this year we received a graph from one of our users that was totally out of this world! Abhishek K., a 10th grader in need of an online, user-friendly graphing calculator, discovered Desmos in the Google Chrome Web Store and decided to take our program for a spin. What came next sent our brains into orbit – Abhishek turned a list of 273 simple equations into an amazing Space Shuttle and launchpad.

View the graph and equations here: www.desmos.com/calculator/if8aqbrqtc

We checked in with Abhishek to learn what inspired him to reach for the stars. Here’s what he had to say:

Q: What was the purpose your graphing project?

A: The purpose of our graphing project was to use all the different conics that included both left, right, up and down parabolas, up/down and left/right hyperbolas, circles, and vertical and horizontal ellipses.

Q: What did you learn by completing it? What math skills did you practice?

A: I learned conic functions a lot better just by seeing the graph, and also learned how increasing or decreasing a number could change the shape of the graph dramatically.

Q: Why did you choose to use Desmos?

A: I chose Desmos because I saw it on the Google Chrome Web Store a few days before using the project so I tried it out and realized it is really easy to use and would be the best choice for the project I was making. I also liked how you can change the colors and store several hundred graphs, which may other online graphing tools don’t let you do. My favorite Desmos feature is definitely the fact that several hundred equations could be used – otherwise this graph would have never been possible.

Thanks Abhishek – way to rocket into the mathosphere!

- Team Desmos

P.S. Will you be at the ISTE conference in San Diego this month? Be sure to visit us at booth #4543 to snag a t-shirt featuring Abhishek’s space shuttle design and equations.

We would like to thank all of you who visited the Desmos booth at the 2012 NCTM Conference in Philadelphia! This year was a great success, and we look forward to helping everyone make the most of our program in their classrooms.

Click here to see who won the Liberty Bell Curve Challenge

During NCTM, we held the Liberty Bell Curve Challenge and gave users a chance to help us free math from the tyranny of expensive hardware by creating their own, customized Liberty Bell graph. Everyone who completed the challenge was entered to win an iPad 3. We held the drawing today to pick the lucky winner – click here to find out who it is!

In the next few weeks we will be announcing many new calculator updates, so be sure to join us on Facebook, Twitter, and our Blog to stay in the loop.

Happy Graphing,
Team Desmos

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