Des-blog

The Friday Fave—like the rest of the Desmos team—is excited about supporting math classrooms as social and creative spaces. One of our favorite tools for doing so is Challenge Creator; in which students build challenges, which go into a class gallery for their classmates to solve.

When we built Challenge Creator, we expected that students would be motivated to work on tasks their peers had designed. We also expected that they would be fired up to think hard about designing challenging tasks for their classmates. What we didn’t expect—but which turns out to be true—is that we can count on students to make a wide range of mathematically important examples.

For example, in our classroom testing we found that the small sample below is typical of a dashboard in Land the Plane, where you need to write an equation that describes a flight path for the plane to send it down the middle of the runway.

Students make challenges with positive and negative slopes, with points that are on and off the axes, and they make challenges with horizontal and vertical runways.

Knowing that students consistently vary the task in these ways means we at Desmos can build a shorter activity. We don’t need to build every important variation into the activity because the kids will do that! And then they’ll eagerly work on these challenges because their classmates designed them.

Social, creative mathematics isn’t just more engaging; it can also be more challenging and rich. That’s why Challenge Creator—and two activities with Challenge Creator built in—are this week’s Friday Fave. Go give Land the Plane and Pomegraphit a spin, and let us know what challenges your students dream up for each other!

And don’t forget another tool for social and creative mathematical work: Polygraph. Here are two of the Fave’s fave Polygraphs (but don’t limit yourself to these; we’ve got dozens of them!):

Polygraph: Hexagons

Polygraph: Parabolas

The Friday Fave has been watching the Olympics, which on broadcast television in the United States means 1000 rounds of figure skating, plus cutaways to Lindsey Vonn, and to other Americans winning at other things.

One of those other things that Americans have won at, and so the Fave has been able to watch on network television, is the half-pipe. This led to the Fave and the Fave’s daugther (Lil Fave?) wondering how they make half pipes.

Here’s how:

That thing is called the Pipe Monster, for obvious reasons. Credit and thanks to Zaugg America for the image.

Once you know how the half pipe is made, you’re likely to get curious about related things. Like how do they make the pile of snow for the Pipe Monster to carve? How fast does the Pipe Monster drive down the pipe? How much snow are we talking about here?!?!?

This is the sort of question that Andrew Stadel has been working hard to help people get better at both asking and answering. If you’re not familiar with Estimation 180, get yourself over there right away to find estimation tasks for each of the 180 days of the school year, in sets of increasing difficulty and sophistication.

All of which brings us around to this week’s Friday Fave, which is an Estimation 180/Desmos mashup that Mr. Stadel has been working on. He used Activity Builder to build a richer environment for his estimation tasks, including dynamic visual representations and a robust teacher dashboard for collecting and sharing student responses. He’d like you to use what he built.

It’s really exciting to see teachers putting Des-tools to work in ways we could not have imagined on our own.

But don’t take the Fave’s word for it. Head on over to Estimation 180 and check it out now.

This week’s Friday Fave is the community of math teachers of which Desmos is fortunate to be a part.

Teaching is difficult work. As we were all reminded this week, teaching is occasionally needlessly dangerous work. Above all, teaching is important work.

Because teaching is important, we take our role in the community seriously. We build tools that let students and teachers make amazing things.

We share some of those amazing things on our website in a form where other community members can open them up, learn from them, modify and remix them.

A number of our favorite activities (such as Land the Plane) began as activities that someone in the community built, and then we applied a coating of Des-polish to them, crediting the folks who let us build on their ideas.

We have a few activities that have been translated (such this one in Dutch, and this one in French), each because a community member asked for the ability to do that work, and then let us share the results.

We are grateful for this community. We learn from all of you. We work hard to contribute. Whether we’ve connected on Twitter, through the calculator, through activities, or in person at a conference or event, know that we want to support our fellow community members and we thank you for working together on our common mission.