Summer is coming to an end in the Northern Hemisphere. Days are getting
shorter; leaves are turning; 12-year-olds are working hard on
percents…
That last one is why this week’s Friday Fave is the new
percent of feature in the calculator.
From time to time, we at Desmos develop a feature or two because one or more
partners needs us to. So it was recently with percent. A partner wanted a
percent key.
The initial reaction was “There will be no percent key!”
But we dug deeper and soon got to the heart of the matter—"Why do we
object to a percent key?“
"Well…because they all behave unpredictably—different on every
calculator and with undiscoverable rules. Like what does 55 + 10% even mean?!?”
And that’s when it hit us. Desmos could decide how the Desmos
percent key would work, and that means Desmos can make it transparent!
So typing “%” now gets you “% of” and everything works
exactly as it should.
55+10% is not well defined because we need to know what you want to find 10%
of. The syntax makes that clear.
You can put a slider on your % of, and you can iterate to find percents
of percents of values.
Transparent, functional percents native in the calculator. That’s this
week’s Friday Fave.
Now while your mind is in the arena of percents, perhaps you’re also
amenable to playing with some activities involving rational numbers more
generally. Here are some suggestions:
Polygraph is a game in which one partner selects a mathematical object, and
the other asks yes/no questions in an effort to narrow the selections down to
the first partner’s selection.
It’s a fabulous way to start your school year, or your next unit. Draw
out student ideas before there is an expectation of specialized vocabulary,
and in doing so, you’ll create the need for that vocabulary in the
lessons to come.
Do you work with young ones who are nonetheless old enough to type? Try out
Polygraph:
Basic Quadrilaterals, or
Advanced Quadrilaterals
if you really want to challenge them.
Maybe you work with algebra students. In that case, the Friday Fave suggests
the Lines or
Parabolas versions of Polygraph.
Advanced algebra, college algebra, and precalculus students will be challenged
by
Polygraph: Rational Functions
(and so will their teachers, for that matter!)
In the Fave’s experience, the majority of Polygraph sessions result in the
teacher gaining new insights into their students’ mathematical minds. And
that’s pretty high on the list of priorities at the beginning of the school year!
Check it out! We’ve made changes to your activity dashboards.
Before:
After:
We don’t make these kinds of changes lightly. We want our software and
your classes to become tightly integrated, and a change of this magnitude
isn’t far from coming to class and finding your furniture re-arranged.
We want to explain why we re-arranged your furniture.
First, we don’t make these decisions in a vacuum. In the five years
since we debuted our first activity dashboard, we’ve logged tens of
thousands of support emails, thousands of feature requests over Twitter, and
hundreds of hours of classroom testing, all of which gave us a very clear set
of goals heading into the project.
Here are those goals, and how we tried to accomplish them.
Our activities have grown richer and more complex, and our dashboard needed
to keep up.
We create activities internally using a scripting language we call Computation
Layer, which enables very interesting interactions between students and
mathematics. Our previous dashboard required you to click through to
individual student screens to learn anything about those interactions. We
wanted to make sure our new dashboard gave teachers a transparent view into
student work.
We wanted to make sure teachers could see the class’s progress at a
glance.
Previously, teachers had to look at one student screen after another in order
to get a sense of the class’s progress. We heard from lots of teachers
and we also experienced ourselves the need for a summary view.
We’re starting as simply as we can here. We could add lots of icons to
these cells. We could surface the equation each student graphed, or their
solution for a problem. But we decided this view should show as little it had
to in order to help teachers do their work. We started with a blank summary
view and made each icon we added clearly articulate its value to the teacher
and fight for its place.
We needed to simplify our conversation toolkit – especially teacher
pacing.
One way we separate ourselves from a lot of math edtech is that we design
activities for classrooms, not individuals. Our ideal Desmos
Classroom is a social, chatty space, where the teacher is using our dashboard
to
orchestrate productive discussions
and arbitrate mathematical arguments.
That’s why we built
our conversation toolset, not for classroom management, but for classroom dialog. That toolkit
includes the ability to pace students to one or more screens, so that your
class can mine those parts of our activities for all the value they offer
before moving on.
That pacing is central to the value we offer teachers and students, but our
classroom testing demonstrated time and again that it wasn’t as
intuitive as it needed to be.
So we changed our pacing interface, adding a ribbon of thumbnails across the
top of the screen so you can always see where the class is and where
it’s going. We made it easy to advance every student a slide ahead and
to change the boundaries on their exploration.
Early Feedback
Each of our teams at Desmos bring unique value to our work. The teaching team
represented the needs of teachers, especially their need not to waste a single
second trying to interpret a confusing user interface. The product team made
those designs and our engineering team rigged it all up to work.
The early feedback has been extremely positive:
Summary view is brilliant, also the new pacing interface is much better
– easy to set up pacing and also change the set of screens without
removing pacing altogether.
I like that you can focus on one student’s work or one question’s answers.
Much easier to give feedback.
It seemed easier to switch between different student answers when talking
through some key misunderstandings with the whole class.
There isn’t a better time to try out
a free Desmos activity. We’re so
grateful to everyone who offered feedback that helped us develop this tool and
we’d love to hear from more of you on Twitter
@desmos or by email to
feedback@desmos.com.
