Des-blog

The Friday Fave is in its summer splendor. Whether school is out yet or not, the reader must acknowledge that the first weekend in June is something special (sorry, Southern Hemisphere!)

The season not a thing to do with this week’s Friday Fave, though. It’s not antithetical; just irrelevant.

This week’s Fave is Point Collector. Possibly the reader can imagine that there are certain personalities at Desmos HQ that insisted not just on solving the Point Collector challenges, but in solving them more cleverly than anyone else.

Whether you’re just solving for your own delight, or being competitively clever, Point Collector offers multiple routes to success. We offer you some red and some blue points, and some rules about how including these in the shaded region of your inequality will affect your score. How to capture—or exclude—these points is up to you.

So go ahead and challenge yourself, your students, or a clever coworker to a few rounds of Point Collector. You’ll be playing along with the Friday Fave when you do.

And while you’re thinking about inequalities, here are some more activities to explore:

Inequalities on the Number Line

Absolute Value Inequalities on the Number Line

Polygraph: Linear Inequalities

The Friday Fave doesn’t really understand running. The Fave runs fast, but only when chasing a Frisbee or ball. The Fave is a bit like a Labrador Retriever that way.

Nonetheless, the Fave understands that people do run when they are not chasing things, and that such people keep track of how far they have run and how long it has taken them. If you’re going to be doing such a thing, you really should be sharing the mathy results with the rest of us.

That’s exactly what’s going on in The Running Game, this week’s Friday Fave. The Running Game isn’t an elaborate affair; it’s a simple, clear activity that has students use proportionality to go from inaccurate guessing to very reasonable predicting.

So go ahead and give your students the experience of using math to do something better.

And then make them run laps. It’s the end of the year; there’s a lot of energy to burn off! Tell ‘em the Friday Fave said they had to.

And while you’re watching the clock, here are a few more activities that use time as a variable.

Water Line

Predicting Movie Ticket Prices

Commuting Times

The Friday Fave has a soft spot in its heart for fractions. Just because we CAN write things in decimals doesn’t mean we should.

Often, a fraction is the exactly right thing to express the relationship you’re investigating.

Case in point—finding areas of sectors of circles. This week’s Friday Fave is Sector Area, where you’ll have way more success expressing your responses in the form of a fraction. It’ll be more precise, and it’ll generalize better in the end.

And generalizing is what this is all about. Students don’t need a formula for sector area; they can figure this out for themselves. With Sector Area, we provide tools for doing exactly that.

And then while you’re in a circular kind of mood, consider taking these activities for a spin…

Circle Patterns

Polygraph: Circles and Ellipses

Penny Circle