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Friday Fave for January 12

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.

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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.)

Friday Fave for January 5

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

Friday Fave for December 15

The Friday Fave is feeling nostalgic this holiday season, and is thinking back to the activity that started it all.

Desmos released Penny Circle a bit more than four years ago, in July 2013—our first activity. Penny Circle was well received by students, teachers, and curriculum aficionados alike. Embedding the Desmos graphing calculator into an online modeling activity that runs on any web browser, and supplementing it with tools for collecting and sharing data, and for teachers to see student work in real time gave teachers and students a new kind of mathematical power.

But the years did not treat the underlying technology kindly. Browsers evolved. Our ideas about how to use technology to support teachers’ work evolved.

All of which is why we’ve rebuilt Penny Circle using the Activity Builder platform. What originally took months to build took us a couple of weeks to rebuild from scratch inside of Activity Builder, a testament to the power of this platform.

So now is the time, fellow citizens of the math-learning internet! If you’ve not used Penny Circle before, it’s waiting for you here. If you used it a while back and it was showing its age technologically, try the updated form!

When your students are arguing over whether and why their data is linear, quadratic, or exponential you’ll be glad you did!

And while you’re thinking about modeling activities, here are a few more favorites the Fave recommends.

Charge!

Mocha Modeling: Starbucks Locations

Card Sort: Modeling