Briefly
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At Desmos, we’re now asking ourselves one question about everything we
make: “Will this help teachers develop social and
creative classrooms?” We’ve chosen those adjectives
because they’re simultaneously qualities of effective learning and
also interesting technology.
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We’ve upgraded three activities (and many more to come) with our new
Challenge Creator feature:
Parabola Slalom,
Laser Challenge, and
Point Collector: Lines. Previously, students would only complete challenges we created. Now
they’ll create challenges for each other.
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The results from numerous classroom tests have been – I am not kidding you
here – breathtaking. Near unanimous engagement. Interactions between
students around mathematical ideas we haven’t seen in our activities before.
Read More One question in edtech bothers us more
than nearly any other:
Why are students so engaged by their tablets, phones, and laptops
outside of class and so bored by them inside of class?
It’s the
same device. But in one context, students are generally
enthusiastic and focused. In the other, they’re often apathetic and
distracted.
At Desmos, we notice that, outside of class, students
use their devices in ways that are social and creative. They create all kinds of
media – text messages, videos, photos, etc. – and they share that media with
their peers via social networks.
You might think that comparison is
unfair – that school could never stack up next to Instagram or Snapchat – but
before we write it off, let’s ask ourselves, “
How social and creative is math edtech?” What do students create and whom do they share those creations with?
In typical math edtech,
students create number responses and multiple choice answers. And they typically share those creations with an algorithm, a few lines of
code. In rarer cases, their
teacher will see those creations, but more
often the teacher will only see the grade the algorithm gave them.
For those reasons, we think that
math edtech is generally anti-social and uncreative, which
explains some of the apathy and distraction we see when students use technology
inside of class.
Rather than write off the comparison to Instagram
and Snapchat as unreasonable, it has motivated us to ask two more questions:
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How can we help students create mathematically in more
diverse ways?
So we invite students to create
parking lots,
scale giants,
mathematical arguments,
tilings,
sketches of relationships,
laser configurations,
drawings of polygons,
tables,
stacks of cards,
Marbleslides,
informal descriptions of mathematical abstractions,
sequences of transformations,
graphs of the world around them, and many more.
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How can we help teachers and students
interact socially around those creations?
So we collect all of those creations on a teacher dashboard and we give teachers
a toolkit
and strategies to help them create conversations around those creations.
It’s easier to ask your students, “How are these two sketches the
same? How are they different?” when both sketches are right in front of
you and you’re able to pause your class to direct their focus to that
conversation.
Today, we’re releasing a new tool to help
teachers develop social and creative math classrooms.
Challenge Creator
Previously in our activities, students would only complete
challenges
we created and answer questions
we asked. With
Challenge Creator, they create challenges for
each other and ask
each other questions.
We tried this in one of our first
activities,
Waterline, where,
first, we asked students to create a graph based on three vases
we gave
them.
And then we asked them to create a vase themselves. If they could successfully
graph the vase, it went into a gallery where other students would try to graph
it also.
We began to see
reports
online of
students’ impressive creativity and perseverance on that particular
challenge. We started to suspect the following: that students care
somewhat when they share their creations with an algorithm, and care
somewhat
more when they share their creations with their teacher.
But they care enormously when they share their creations with each
other.
So we’ve added “Challenge Creators” to three more
activities, and we now have the ability to add them to
any activity in
a matter of hours where it first took us a month.
In
Parabola Slalom, we ask students to find equations of parabolas that slip in between the gates
on a slalom course. And now we invite them to create slalom courses for each
other. Those challenges can be as difficult as the authors want, but unless they
can solve it, no one else will see it.
In
Laser Challenge, we ask students to solve reflection challenges that
we created. And
now we invite them to create reflection challenges for each other. In
Point Collector, we ask students to use linear inequalities to capture blue points in the
middle of a field of points. And now we invite them to create a field of points
for each other.
We’ve tested each of these extensively with
students. In those tests we saw:
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Students calling out their successes to each other from across the room.
“Javi, I got a perfect score on yours!”
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Students calling out their frustrations to each other from across the room.
“Cassie, how do you even do that?”
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Students introducing themselves to each other through their challenges.
“Who is Oscar?”
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Students differentiating their work. “Let’s find an easy one. Oo
– Jared’s.”
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Students looking at solutions to challenges they’d already completed,
and learning new mathematical techniques. “You can
do that?!”
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Students marveling at each others’ ingenuity. “Damn, Oscar. You
hella smart.”
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Proud creation. One student said, “We’re going to make our
challenge as hard as possible,” to which his partner responded,
“But we have to be able to solve it!”
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Screams and high fives so enthusiastic you’d think we were paying them.
At the end of one test of Point Collector, we asked students, “What was
your favorite part of the activity?” 25 out of 27 students said some
version of “Solving other people’s challenges.”
I’m not saying what we saw was on the same level of enthusiasm and focus
as Instagram or Snapchat.
But it wasn’t that far off, either.
Questions We Can Answer How much does it cost?
As with everything else we make that’s free for you to use
now, we will never charge you for it.
Will we be able to create our own Challenge Creators?
Eventually, yes. Currently, the Triple C (Challenge Creator Creator,
obv.) has too many rough edges to release widely. Once those edges are sanded
down, we’ll release it. We don’t have a timeline for that work, but
just as we think
student work is at its best when it’s social and
creative, we think
teacher work is at its best under those exact same
conditions. We want to give teachers the best toolkit possible and enable them
to share their creations with each other.
Questions We Can’t Answer
What effect does asking a student to create
a challenge have on her learning and her interest in learning?
What sorts of challenges are most effective? Is this approach just as
effective for arithmetic expressions as laser challenges?
Does posing your own problem help you understand the limits of a concept
better than if you only complete someone else’s problems?
Researchers, grad students, or any other parties interested in those
same questions:
please get in touch.
