Des-blog

Today, we’re excited to share the fruits of over a year of labor at Desmos Studio: our new 3D Calculator.

Why jump into this new dimension? 3D graphing doesn’t make all that many appearances in K-12 education. Few people today instinctively reach for a 3D calculator when trying to reason about a question.

But that’s exactly why this tool has felt so important to develop. The world we inhabit is three-dimensional. So much interesting mathematics lives there, from the abstract (e.g. conic sections) to the practical (volume, surface area), to the professional (movie & game design). Yet very few of us have built up a deep intuition for how points, curves, and surfaces behave in three dimensions.

We’re hoping that we can help to change that. Over and over we’ve seen the power that comes from matching a powerful tool with a curious mind. The products we strive to build make it possible to more easily explore new ideas, to develop them, and to share them. We’re eager to hear from you whether we’ve hit the mark with this first version — and also how it can improve from here!

Read on for some interactive examples of the 3D Calculator in action.

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Desmos Studio PBC has a fresh new Terms of Service and Privacy Policy to match our fresh new homepage.

You might have a pit in your stomach anytime you see an update like this. You might worry, as we often do, that it’s actually a sneaky power or privacy grab (“surprise, we now have the right to listen to all of your conversations!”). Not so here – the primary motivation for these changes is to reflect last year’s split into Desmos Studio and Desmos Classroom. For example, we needed to change every instance of Desmos Inc (which no longer exists) to Desmos Studio PBC (our new name). We also needed to remove references to Desmos Classroom, which is now part of Amplify and governed by their Acceptable Use Policy and Privacy Policy.

While we were revising, we wanted to make a few other improvements based on questions and feedback we’ve gotten over the past year. For example, we added clarity about allowed use of images generated using Desmos Studio’s tools. No additional permission is required for these uses – just attribution – even when embedded in a commercial application. Similarly, we’ve gotten some questions about whether Desmos-generated images are compatible with the CC-BY requirements for inclusion on platforms like Wikipedia. The answer: an enthusiastic yes, and our terms now reflect that as well. If you ever have a question about collaborating with Desmos Studio, you can find us at partnerships@desmos.com.

As always, we try for maximum transparency with changes to our policies. You can see a line-by-line “diff” of all of the changes, and can see the history of past changes as well. If you’re familiar with GitHub, you can subscribe to any future changes.

In general, we recommend reading through any company’s terms of service instead of relying on a summary from them. If there’s anything in there that feels off with our Terms of Service, Privacy Policy, or any related docs, now or in the future, please let us know at feedback@desmos.com. We want these to be as straightforward and fair as possible, and will continue to refresh them as we hear from you, and as Desmos Studio PBC continues to grow and change in the years to come.

See the updated policies here:

• Terms of Service
• Privacy Policy
• Privacy FAQs
• Student Data Privacy Statement
• California Privacy Rights Statement
• Cookie Policy

Today, we’re releasing a brand new tool from Desmos Studio PBC. It’s the successor to our Geometry Tool, built on top of the computational engine of the Graphing Calculator. If you want to try it out, we’ll take no offense if you stop reading and head to www.desmos.com/geometry-beta. We’ve also embedded some interactive examples that you can play with below.

We’re excited about this tool for three reasons.

First, Geometry is such a beautiful and universal subject. It starts with simple tools – just lines and circles – which, in combination, can be used to construct incredibly intricate and complicated things. Across all of mathematics, and much of science, geometric interpretations help things “make sense.”

Second, by building on top of the math engine of our graphing calculator, this new Geometry Tool gives power well beyond what the previous tool could. You can compute, plot on a coordinate plane, use sliders and lists, and even leverage advanced features like custom colors and actions, all integrated into the constructive geometry world.

Finally, this tool is the first major release of Desmos Studio PBC, and perfectly encapsulates why we formed this entity.

Just under a year ago, we made a huge change to Desmos. We split in half, and the curriculum business and teacher.desmos.com were acquired by Amplify Education, a long-time partner and collaborator. We chose Amplify because we wanted to find a trusted and respected home that could help expand the curriculum to cover all of K-12 while reaching more and more classrooms. That curriculum is cruising, including recently getting a perfect score(!) from EdReports.

As Desmos Studio PBC, we want to focus all of our energy on refining our tools and expanding their capabilities. We want to keep pushing the boundary of what’s possible with accessibility in mathematics. And we want to build new tools to unleash everyone’s inner mathematician.

This new Geometry Tool is the result of countless hours of work across our entire team, and we’re really excited to share beta access with you. Let’s see how it works.

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