Des-blog

When authoring a Desmos activity there is an option for answers to be submitted to the teacher, or submitted to the class. We asked the Desmos fellows this week whether or not they find it beneficial to let students see their classmates’ responses in a Desmos Activity, and how they might make use of the responses during instruction. Our consensus was that it depends on the type of problem and activity, and that seeing classmates’ response can serve many different purposes. Here are some of our ideas:

Nick Corley has noticed that when students are developing understanding of a new idea, seeing other responses can make students rethink their initial response as they work towards a full understanding of the concept. For example, in Marbleslides: Lines Apollonius may make the connection that vertically slanted means the same thing as slope, and that lines can have a positive or negative slope.

Teachers might choose to display some of these responses during a class discussion to help students make connections between their previous conceptions and the more formal presentation of a topic that they may encounter in a textbook. Suzanne von Oy appreciates this option for screens where students are asked to reflect on their strategy or explain thinking. Hearing how classmates word ideas can help with the learning process.

Kendra Lockman and Paul Jorgens both shared that feedback from classmates during the initial part of a practice activity can help students build confidence. Paul offered that if there is a single correct answer to a set of screens, it might be helpful to start with “Submit to Class” so students can self correct or self affirm and end with a “Submit to Teacher” problem to serve as an exit ticket.

The responses in this activity offer students a chance to check their thinking, but to also see several ways to represent the correct answer. Scott Miller appreciates opportunities like this for students to identify equivalence and differences in words, equations, thinking and graphs.

Another way to let students see classmates’ responses is to display the teacher dashboard. The summary view can be used to highlight different ways to represent answers, and can serve as a conversation starter around developing conceptions.

In her role as a math coach, Jenn Vadnais supported teachers in using both the dashboard and “Submit to Class” option to create opportunities for math discourse that supports student learning. She shared that students love reading their classmates’ responses.

Heather Bolur has also found that her students enjoy reading responses from their classmates, and that using “Submit to Class” keeps them from answering with “I don’t know”.

Allison Krasnow has found “Submit to Class” to be a distractor for the 4th and 5th grade students that she works with. She’s found it more valuable to pause the activity and pull the class to the rug to look carefully at a few responses.

What are other examples where you’ve found it beneficial to let students see their classmates’ responses? Let us know on Twitter @desmos.

On Tuesday, Feb. 28, 2017, Desmos experienced a complete service outage of our public calculator as well as the API that our partners use to embed the calculator into their sites. Our outage was related to the outage of Amazon’s S3 storage service, which also affected many other sites across the internet. We’d like to explain what happened and some steps we are taking to reduce the chance of something similar happening again.

Amazon S3 is a critical piece of internet infrastructure that many sites like Desmos use for data storage. In particular, Desmos uses S3 to store our users’ saved graphs.

At 9:37AM PST on Tuesday, the S3 service stopped responding to network requests (more details from the Amazon team). As Desmos users attempted to access their saved graphs, open requests to retrieve the graph data from S3 accumulated and eventually overwhelmed our web servers. These servers stopped responding to network requests, including the “health check” requests that we use to automatically remove failing hardware from our system. Since these servers began to fail their health checks, they were automatically terminated.

At 11:11AM PST, Desmos restored partial service including full service for our partner API by routing traffic to servers in “maintenance mode.” When the site is in maintenance mode, no external requests are made to either S3 or our database, and users are able to use the calculator, but they cannot sign in to their accounts or access saved graphs.

At 3:42PM PST, full service was restored for the rest of the site. At this time, some of our internal infrastructure tools were performing very slowly, so we waited until these tools were operating normally at 5:55PM PST to announce that full service had been restored.

The most frustrating part of the outage from our point of view is that it took over 90 minutes to restore API service and “maintenance mode” service for the calculator. We had an emergency system in place that serves the API and the calculator using only static files so that the site can operate with basic functionality even if all of our web servers fail. Under normal circumstances we would have been able to switch over to this system in a matter of minutes; however, these static files were stored on S3, so the same S3 outage that interrupted our primary service meant that we could not use this emergency system either.

Going forward, we are planning to host a redundant copy of this emergency system with a different storage provider, so that we can respond faster in case of Amazon infrastructure failures.

Our emergency response was also complicated by the fact that all of our normal web servers (which are also hosted with Amazon) were terminated when they failed their health checks. Because of cascading failures of Amazon’s systems, we were not able to bring up new replacement servers for several hours. To restore partial service when we did, we had to repurpose a server that is usually used as an internal staging server, manually switch it into maintenance mode, and route all of our traffic to it.

Going forward, we will no longer automatically terminate servers that unexpectedly fail health checks. Instead, we will simply route traffic away from them, but leave them available for a period of time for inspection by our engineers. This will allow us to route traffic back to existing servers more rapidly in case of an external emergency that causes all servers to fail health checks at the same time.

Finally, we would like to improve how quickly we communicate with our API partners in case of an emergency. We sent our first email to partners after approximately an hour of down time.

Going forward, it will be our policy to email partners immediately in case of any API outage. Further explanation and advice will be communicated as it becomes available, but should not delay initial communication of the fact that there is a problem.

At Desmos, education is our passion, and we are painfully aware of how disruptive it is to classrooms when technology does not work according to plan. One of our core design principles is “works every time,” which means that teachers should always be able to rely on our tools to work the same way during class that they did during lesson preparation. We, like much of the web, didn’t anticipate an S3 outage of this magnitude. But working every time means ensuring that we’re resilient to even the most unlikely events. We are striving to use the lessons that we learned from this incident to make our service more reliable in the future.

Last year, we flew 39 teachers to Desmos HQ in San Francisco, CA, and the Demos Teaching Fellowship was born.

In the months since, that cohort has been utterly indispensable to our company’s growth – offering us criticism and counsel on early editions of our products and activities – and we’ve done our best to become indispensable to their growth as well. They trade ideas, tips, and questions in a private Slack team. Several of them have now become Desmos Certified Presenters, working with teachers on our behalf at conferences, keynotes, and workshops.

The success of that first cohort guaranteed a second. We want to meet more of you. We want to help you with your work and for you to help us with ours. If that sounds interesting (and we don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t!) click on through to the application. It’s due March 31.