Des-blog

We’ve heard a lot of confusion this past month about whether students can use Desmos during the State of Texas Assessment of Academic Readiness (STAAR).

After several weeks of late nights, and with input from many of you, we’re thrilled to announce that the STAAR version of our Test Mode apps now complies with the Texas graphing calculator policy. To celebrate, we’ve added Texas to the map on www.desmos.com/testing. There, you’ll find detailed information on the differences between STAAR mode and the regular graphing calculator.

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Let’s say you’ve chosen an engaging lesson to use with your students, and now you’re sitting down to plan your instruction. You know you have a context that will make sense to your students, and you know the questions that arise in that context will be both challenging and productive. You’re hoping to launch the task to engage students with the context and with an understanding of what mathematical question they’ll be answering through their work, then give them time to work collaboratively, and finally bring them together to share strategies, formalize methods, and introduce or refine any relevant vocabulary.

How might you get them started in this context? How might you launch your lesson?

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There are things in life that science teachers and math teachers disagree on. Is 0.1 equal to 0.10? Do all numbers require units? Is a ratio different from a rate?

But there is one thing that math and science teachers can always agree on—teaching scientific notation is a strangely difficult thing to do.

Desmos isn’t here to tell you that we’ve solved this problem, but we are here to tell you that we’ve built a thing that makes this difficult thing a bit more fun.

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