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.
We built and sustain the Desmos Fellowship for lots of reasons. One of the
biggest is that those 80 educators make us much smarter about important
questions in math education.
At our Fellowship Weekend in San Francisco, CA, we realized that
several of our members had been asked to teach support classes for
Algebra students who need extra math help on top of their usual period of
math. These teachers were wondering how they could help students generate
necessary fluency and confidence in mathematics without relying on the kind of
memorization and drill routines that diminish confidence and make for an
inflexible kind of fluency.
We posed that question internally to our entire group of fellows and thought
we should share the results with the wider world. Here is a digest of their thinking:
Growth Mindset and Confidence
Thao Phan spends time at the
beginning of each unit helping students build a growth mindset and confidence
through math talks and by
solving tasks using “vertical non-permanent surfaces.” She said, “I want my students to have a toolbox of resources they can
access and to see as many ways to solve and verify a problem as possible.” To
accomplish this Thao uses different representations such as number lines and
area models along with
visual patterns, algebra tiles
and other manipulatives to help students feel confident in their understanding
of topics in her algebra class.
Vocabulary Support
Paul Jorgens has taught many
support classes over the years, and in his experience, mindset, preteaching,
reteaching, and homework support were the keys to success. He said, “It is so
awesome when students come in [to their main class] with some knowledge to
share to the group as a result of the preteaching.” Paul believes that
vocabulary and achievement are tightly related and has
lots of ideas
for helping students develop that vocabulary.
Explorations
Veronica Enriquez views
support classes as a place where teachers can do many of the things that there
isn’t time for in the traditional Algebra class. She shared some strategies
for helping her support students learn to enjoy mathematics: “We did a lot of
hands on activities and explorations that related to what was going on in the
regular classroom. They used shadows to determine the height of different
buildings using proportions, launched paper rockets and used inclinometers to
try do determine the maximum height and the path of the rocket.”
Support
Allison Krasnow has found
that support classes allow teachers “the opportunity to make deep, lasting
change in how struggling students view math, view their own math abilities,
view their relationship with their math teacher, and their success in high
school.” She spends time building a culture of learning, part of which
involves goal setting and self assessment. Allison supports students in
achieving goals by helping them develop habits of mind. She also posts goals
on index cards so that students with similar goals can work together, and
makes time for pair sharing of progress.
Here are some of the resources the Desmos Fellows have used in Algebra support classes.
