The Friday Fave is keeping it simple this week. One feature that makes certain
situations just a bit more delightful.
Zooming in the Desmos graphing calculator has always been easy. Scroll wheels
and track pads alike zoom your view in or out quickly and smoothly.
Recently, we introduced a little bit of magic to give you just a bit more
control over your zooming. Hover your cursor over an axis, press SHIFT, click
and drag.
Now you’re changing the scale on one axis at a time. A simple little
upgrade to your zooming experience is this week’s Friday Fave.
Feedback comes in many forms. We can give feedback by evaluating
a response as correct or incorrect in order to report a score. Alternatively,
we can reflect back what we hear from another person, support them in
considering if that is what they really mean, and allow them to make revisions
until what they are trying to communicate is consistent with how it is being
received.
In
Land the Plane, students see that their slope is incorrect if the plane doesn’t land
on the runway. They can refine their thinking in an effort to be successful -
and to learn how to compute the slope of a line.
In
Match my Parabola, Students see the parabola that corresponds to an equation they submit.
Students are empowered to use this feedback to modify their equation, and move
on when they are satisfied, resulting in increased student learning and motivation.
In
Laser Challenge, students see the angles they selected cause a laser and mirror to animate
to get feedback on the accuracy of their predictions. Through revisions,
students develop their intuition for angle measures and properties of reflections.
Being told an answer hinders motivation and discourages revision. It implies
that someone else already knows the answer and that your thinking is insufficient.
Being shown what you’re saying without judgment supports thinking more deeply.
It can make the goal feel attainable which encourages learning through
revision. That’s why interpretive feedback is this week’s
Friday Fave.
The Friday Fave is a big fan of tasks with more than one right answer. If the
Fave asks Which One Doesn’t Belong? you’d better believe
each of the options can be a right answer. If the Fave asks
How do you know? well, it’s because the Fave really doesn’t
know how you know, but really would like to, and there’s more than one
right way of knowing.
So it is with the newest Desmos activity,
Coin Capture. The challenge is write equations for lines that go through the coins,
capturing them along the way.
In the introductory challenge, you can get them all with one line. But
that’s just Desmos getting you started. As the screen numbers increase,
so does the complexity of the challenge. Here are four solutions to the
challenge on screen 3.
While we keep track of the number of lines you used, that’s not the only
way to describe these. What kinds of thinking is behind each of the solutions
above? Which is most interesting? Which one doesn’t belong? Posing the task is
straightforward, but there are many right answers that vary in interesting
ways. That’s the kind of thing that qualifies an activity for the Friday Fave.
Also there’s a challenge creator.
Now, while you’re thinking about coins and/or targets in the coordinate
plane, here are three more delightful activities:
