Des-blog

It will likely surprise no one that the Friday Fave is a big fan of Which One Doesn’t Belong?— that simple adaptation of an old Sesame Street routine, updated to offer students an environment for noticing a wide variety of properties, and to use the properties to discuss sameness and difference, and to begin asking new mathematical questions.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FClGhto1vIg

In Activity Builder, we have made it easy to build your own Which One Doesn’t Belong? sets using multiple choice images and graphs. Get a new screen, select the multiple choice component, and insert four graphs or images as the choices.

We’ll put them in a two-by-two array and ask students for an explanation.

In the dashboard, you’ll see how many students made each selection, and the explanations they offered. Having gotten these initial informal ideas from your students, you can take the conversation from there!

Of course, there are several activities on teacher.desmos.com that incorporate Which One Doesn’t Belong? screens, including Commuting Times (which scatter plot doesn’t belong?), and Inequalities on the Number Line (which inequality doesn’t belong?) And what is Polygraph besides a giant game of Which One Doesn’t Belong?

Whether you make your own Which One Doesn’t Belong? sets, use some you find on the internet and build them in Activity Builder, or use existing activities that incorporate them, know that Desmos wholeheartedly endorses this use of multiple choice!

Creating space for students to notice important features of mathematical objects whether they know the formal words for those properties or not, this is what makes Which One Doesn’t Belong?—and image-based multiple choice in general—this week’s Friday Fave!

Typically the Friday Fave features a new activity, but not this week. This week, the Fave points your attention to the button in the upper right-hand corner of an activity’s webpage.

Teacher Guides are automatically generated for each activity, and include these features:

• A checklist for lesson planning
  
• Activity screenshots for planning the flow of your lesson
  
• Teacher tips and space for notes on each individual screen
  
• A space for reflecting after the lesson
  

Because they are static content, you can print them out (if you’re old school), annotate them in your favorite tablet software (if you’re newer school), or display them in your Google Glass (does anyone still have that?)

Truly, Teacher Guides are invaluable tools for planning, teaching, and reflecting. But don’t take our word for it! Leanne Branham recently wrote about using a Teacher Guide for Parabola Slalom.

Teacher Guides are a great place to start with any Desmos activity. They allow you to think through what you want to get out of the activity, the teaching moves you will make, which things you can skip and which things all students will engage with.

Click through to read the rest of her piece. Together with Teacher Guides, her blog post is this week’s Friday Fave. And then look for that Teacher Guide button on your next Desmos activity!

(Note: Teacher Guides not yet available for Polygraph or our legacy activities that include Function Carnival, Water Line, and Tile Pile.)

It is January and the Friday Fave is C-O-L-D.

The Fave understands that Sunday’s predicted high of 20°F is not technically twice as warm as tomorrow’s predicted high of 10°F, nor five times as warm as the current 4°F, but it sure is going to feel like it.

Temperatures don’t really work proportionally (a fact that can be derived from the fact that 0°C is not the same as 0°F), but you know what does work proportionally?

A clicking robot!

This week’s Friday Fave is Click Battle, in which we challenge students to predict how many times they can click their mouse buttons in 10 seconds.

We give them a chance to practice for five seconds, and then to revise their predictions.

Are your students robots? Is their click rate consistent?

And if survival in the end times required having the fastest-clicking robot on your team (and it obviously will!) then which of these two robots should you pick? Why?

How will your students reason about this choice? The strategies they use to make these decisions are the real mathematics here. Do they compare 6 seconds to 4 seconds, which is 1.5 times as long? Do they use unit rates? If so, which unit rate: clicks per second, or seconds per click? Do they think about common multiples of 4 and 6, or of 38 and 23? Linger on your students’ strategies, and celebrate their creative ideas!

Now get those clicking fingers (and the brains they’re wired to) warmed up, and prepare for the Click Battle!

While you’re exploring the wonderful world of proportionality, here are a few other faves to try.

Tile Pile

Sugar Sugar

LEGO Prices