Des-blog

Desmos is excited to see loads of you at the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics Annual Conference in Washington DC this month.

Here’s where you’ll find us. First, two special events outside of the normal conference hours.

Desmos Preconference
Wednesday, April 25th • 9AM-12PM • 1PM-4PM

Are you in town early? Skip the sightseeing. Those monuments will be there next time. We won’t! Join us at our preconference in the morning (9-12) or afternoon (1-4).

Josephine Butler Parks Center
2437 15th Street Northwest
Washington, DC 20009

Math Trivia and Happy Hour
Thursday, April 26th • 6:30pm-9:30pm

Come by for the company. Stay around for the drinks & trivia with your host Dan Meyer.

Clyde’s - Piedmont Room
707 7th Street, NW
Washington, DC 20001

Next here are some conference sessions from Desmos faculty and fellows.

Technology That Thinks WITH Students, Not FOR Students
Eli Luberoff
Thursday, April 26, 2018 • 11:00 AM-12:00 PM
Walter E. Washington Convention Center, Salon C

Being Right and Wrong in Different, Interesting Ways
Nolan Doyle
Thursday, April 26, 2018 • 1:30 PM-2:30 PM
Walter E. Washington Convention Center, room 154 AB

Full Stack Lessons
Dan Meyer
Friday, April 27, 2018 • 8:00 A.M.–9:00 A.M.
Walter E. Washington Convention Center, Ballroom A

Applying the Five Practices to Visual Patterns
Michael Fenton
Friday, April 27, 2018 • 9:45 AM-11:00AM
Walter E. Washington Convention Center, room 207 B

Transform a Worksheet to Build Equity and Engagement in the Classroom with Desmos Activity Builder
Jade White, Linda Saeta
Friday, April 27, 2018 • 9:45 AM-11:00 AM
Walter E. Washington Convention Center, room 152 B

From Counting to Calculus: All Students Are Mathematicians
Christopher Danielson
Friday, April 27, 2018 • 4:30 PM-5:30 PM
Walter E. Washington Convention Center, Ballroom A

Math Task Makeover with Desmos Activity Builder
Bob Lochel, Michael Fenton
Friday, April 27, 2018 • 4:30 PM-5:30 PM
Walter E. Washington Convention Center, room 146 A

In our ongoing quest to trick kids into thinking that math is fun, our in-house gamification team has been digging through reams of primary research. Our first challenge: making the notoriously stultifying Marbleslides into a task students might at least pretend to enjoy.

We quickly rejected the idea that mathematics is inherently beautiful and motivating. The research on Intellectual Need, for example, is sparse and unsubstantiated. We urge readers to find any instance of people seeking out mathematics except under duress.

Instead we dove into other disciplines. We considered economics - e.g. bribing students. We considered Marbleslides badges and Snapchat filters. At the end of the day, the solution had been right in front of us all along: Marbleslides just needed sound effects.

Introducing: Mariobleslides. Try it at teacher.desmos.com/marbleslides-lines

=== Update, April 2nd ===

The sound effects in Marbleslides are actually part of our ongoing effort to push the limits on accessibility for vision-impaired and blind users of Desmos. They’re here to stay! To enable Marbleslides’ Sound Effects, type Alt+A on windows or Option+A on mac. For more keyboard shortcuts in Marbleslides, scroll to the bottom of this page:

teacher.desmos.com/marbleslides-lines

“Surprising” probably isn’t in the top ten list of adjectives students would use to describe math class, which is too bad since surprise lends itself to learning.

Surprise occurs when the world reveals itself as more orderly or disorderly than we expected. When we’re surprised, we relax assumptions about the world we previously held tightly. When we’re surprised, we’re interested in resolving the difference between our expectations and reality.

In short, when we’re surprised we’re ready to learn.

We can design for surprise too, increasing the likelihood students experience that readiness for learning. But the Intermediate Value Theorem does not, at first glance, look like a likely site for mathematical surprise. I mean read it:

If a continuous function, f, with an interval, [a, b], as its domain, takes values f(a) and f(b) at each end of the interval, then it also takes any value between f(a) and f(b) at some point within the interval.

[I slam several nails through the door and the floor so you’re stuck here with me for a second.]

Nitsa Movshovits-Hadar argues in a fantastic essay that “every mathematics theorem is surprising.” She continues, “If the claim stated in the theorem were trivial it would be of no interest to establish it.”

What surprised Cauchy so much that he figured he should take a minute to write the Intermediate Value Theorem down? How can we excavate that moment of surprise from the antiseptic language of the theorem? Check out our activity and watch how it takes that formal mathematical language and converts it to a moment of surprise.

We ask students, which of these circles must cross the horizontal axis? Which of them might cross the horizontal axis? Which of them must not cross the horizontal axis?

They formulate and defend their conjectures and then we invite them to inspect the graph.

In the next round, we throw them their first surprise: functions are fickle. Do not trust them.

And then finally we throw them the surprise that led Cauchy to establish the theorem:

But you can’t expect me to spoil it. Check it out, and then let us know how you’ve integrated surprise into your own classrooms.