Des-blog

Sometimes the Friday Fave just wants to have fun.

There are few things more diverting than a good round of minigolf. Desmos Fellow Jenn Vadnais put together a Marbleslides/minigolf mashup, Desmos applied a small amount of Activity Polish ™, and now it is offered up to you as this week’s Friday Fave: Minigolf Marbleslides

You cannot control your club, but you do control deflections of the marbles as you strive to get them in the hole. Don’t bother lining up your shot; this game is all about the carom.

So next time you need your students to get some practice with specifying and naming points in the coordinate plane, give Minigolf Marbleslides a try. It’s this week’s Friday Fave.

And since you’re already thinking about small versions of big things (for that’s the whole thing about minigolf—it’s right there in the name!), why not check out a few more Desmos activities related to scale? Here are three to try:

Marcellus the Giant

Polygraph: Transformations

Blue Point Rule

Two weeks ago the Desmos Fellows had a Desmos Potluck. This week we’re continuing to learn from and enjoy the graphs that were contributed. Check out the latest round of Desmos Potluck graphs to level up your calculator skills, and expand your knowledge of what is possible with the Desmos Calculator.

In this week’s offerings you’ll find a variety of graphs that range from artistic designs created using lists, to graphs that make use of parameters to control an animation.

Jenn Vadnais created this animation using tables and a single parameter to control the motion.

Paul Jorgens created this graph as an extension of the Origami Challenge that he uses in his Algebra class.

As with all Desmos Potlucks, we hope you’ll join in the fun! Here’s how you can participate:

• Find a graph from the activity that interests you. Try to recreate that graph. If you need support, you can ask us on Twitter @desmos or take a look at the contents of the folder. Some folders are hidden from the student view, so feel free to make a copy of the activity and check the folder contents in authoring mode.
• Let us know on Twitter which graph you recreated. What did you learn as you created the graph? Any surprises or challenges?
• What dishes can you contribute?

The Friday Fave is in a spring-cleaning sort of way these days. Window washing, dusting, organizing, and on and on.

While one is dusting the pictures on the wall, one tends to notice the dust behind the pictures, so one really ought to take the pictures off the walls.

And while the pictures are off the walls anyway, it’s a great time to redecorate. And while that’s going on, if one wants one’s pictures hung properly, one is going to need some mathematics.

This is where Picture Perfect comes in.

The challenge is to space the pictures evenly along the wall. Eyeball their locations first. Use numbers, then variables later on. In all cases, bad spacing means pictures falling off the walls.

This is a lesson about linear functions and arithmetic sequences.

It’s also a lesson about the natural consequences of spring cleaning and that’s why Picture Perfect is this week’s Friday Fave.

Now where did that recipe for homemade window cleaner go?