Des-blog

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.

In this season of awards, the Friday Fave is thinking about movies, which have gotten expensive. Back when the Fave was a child, why movies only cost….

Well, what’s your guess?

Go ahead and formalize that guess with this week’s Friday Fave: Predicting Movie Ticket Prices. The first thing we’ll have you do is consider the general form of the relationship between time and ticket prices.

Sketch that relationship.

If you and your classmates are a typical collection of diverse-minded people, this simple act of sketching will generate something to discuss. In just the small sample above, we could talk about whether the relationship is linear or non-linear; whether it makes more sense to use discrete points or a continuous curve, and when (if ever) the relationship should end.

By the end of the activity, we’ll show you a whole lot more data, and we’ll ask you to identify an interesting feature of the graph, and to interpret its meaning in terms of movie ticket prices. Perhaps you and your classmates will be more like-minded this time.

Even if you don’t have a diversity of thought about what’s interesting, there’s something to talk about. What happened? Math helps you ask a question about economics, or maybe about technology, or cultural trends, or something else altogether.

Informal mathematical ideas leading to inquiry inside and outside of mathematics is the mission in Predicting Movie Ticket Prices, this week’s Friday Fave.

While you’re provoking thinking with data plots, give these other activities a look too:

Polygraph: Scatter Plots

Commuting Times

Area v. Perimeter