Des-blog

It is gray outside the Friday Fave’s window as autumn begins in earnest. The Fave is left craving color and joy and beauty.

Fortunately, the Fave has a prescription—for Des-art. And now you do, too.

Maybe your art will take the form of curve tracing of a background image. The following examples, and many more, are waiting to inspire you at desmos.com/art

Or perhaps you’ll go a different route and create beauty from pure abstraction.

Many more examples of abstract art live at desmos.com/math

Finally, you may possibly find your artistic medium in images that are placed in calculated ways. Shelley Carranza built this beauty with a single teal square and a whole bunch of math.

She added a white square to the mix to make this one.

And finally, she used three images artfully arranged to make this gorgeous pattern.

Whether you are doing art to liven a gray autumn day, or using it as an invitation to mathematics for your students, Des-art—in all its many forms—may just become your Friday Fave every day of the week!

A while back, high school teacher and Desmos fellow Sara Van Der Werf wrote about the Desmos graphing calculator in general, and the app in particular.

In the last few years I’ve started writing the phrase, “Check your solutions in Desmos.” on the bottom of any assignment that Desmos would benefit students (which is many of them).

I have found that students who do use my suggestion to use Desmos to check their work are more likely to use it on their own to check work or as a tool for exploring & learning.

Sara noticed that a much larger percentage of the students in her Minneapolis classroom had smartphones or tablets than had reliable wifi, and certainly more had these devices than had regular access to graphing calculators. So she began encouraging her students to use the school wifi to download the Desmos app, thereby ensuring they had ready access to graphing calculator technology whether online or off.

Here are some bullet points to build the case for the free Desmos app; available on both Android and iOS:

• Solving a quadratic equation? Check your answer by graphing the original function and see where it intersects the x-axis.
  
• Simplifying or factoring? Graph both forms to verify that they are equivalent.
  
• Teachers can model and support students in using the app on their phones to check themselves, reducing dependence on the teacher.
  
• Since Desmos is on the state assessments in 21 states now, the app supports students in building confidence since they learning using the same tool they will have during their assessment
  
• Once downloaded, the app does not require wifi or cellular data! The computations all happen inside your device.

The Desmos app: It’s this week’s Friday Fave!

Hashtags are funny things.

Mocked, memed, misunderstood, and yet so solidly useful.

This week’s Friday Fave is a particularly useful hashtag: #ImproveMyAB (where AB stands for Activity Builder, of course).

The brainchild of Desmos Fellow Kathy Henderson, #ImproveMyAB is a key to unlocking some most excellent collaboration online. By posting an activity to Twitter using #ImproveMyAB, you are saying two things: (1) “I have been working on an activity (or and idea for one)” and (2) “I have an inner desire to make this activity into something great!” You are issuing an invitation to conversation about teaching.

Of course, the hashtag is also a great place to stop by to see what others are making and to offer your own advice.

A quick peek at the hashtag turns up recent conversations about activities on a wide range of topics, including derivatives, exponential functions, domain and range, and exterior angles of polygons. Do you have thoughts to offer on these topics? Do you need inspiration for them? Do you have something else you’d like to work on, and need to connect with folks who can help? Check out #ImproveMyAB, it’s hashtag-amazing!

And it’s this week’s Friday Fave.