Des-blog

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?

From time to time the Desmos Fellows have a Desmos Potluck, where each of us brings a dish so that we may connect, level up our calculator skills, and expand our knowledge of what is possible with the Desmos Calculator.

The Desmos Fellows and team have spent the last week preparing dishes for the latest Desmos Potluck, and we want to extend an invitation to all of our math friends.

Here’s a sample dish contributed by Suzanne von Oy. Suzanne’s dish was inspired by a blog post from Colossal that included many interesting animations.

Patty Stephens created the graph below to accompany a math task for a class in her district.

Here’s how you can participate in the latest Desmos Potluck:

• 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?

We hope you’ll join in the meal.

When Megan Hayes-Golding shared this photograph on Twitter and Instagram, we knew pretty quickly that we wanted to build a Desmo-fied version.

It took us some time, but now it’s live, free, and ready for you and your students to try your hands and minds at visualizing and specifying angles.

You’ll start simply: One mirror and simply-arranged targets. But pretty soon you’re getting good, so we’ll up the challenge. More mirrors; targets in surprising and challenging locations. Finish up by designing a challenge for your classmates!

Visualizing, feedback that shows you the consequences of your thinking, opportunities to revise and to challenge yourself and others…these are things that make for a great Friday Fave.

Go give Laser Challenge a try!