Des-blog

The Friday Fave has a cold nose and a warm heart on this early January day.

This week, we’re featuring Investigating Rate of Change, a simple and fun exploration of the relationship between graphs and equations based on slope.

What makes this activity worthy of Fave status is that the activity is driven throughout by the ideas and examples students bring to the activity.

From the opening screen that encourages creativity….

…to a challenge creator that has students swap devices…

…Investigating Rate of Change keeps students’ thinking at the center, as it builds their knowledge of slope relationships in graphs and equations.

Hey Desmos-friends, this is a quick announcement that you can now attach a label to any point you create in Desmos.

Here is why this feature was worth your wait and worth a blog post.

It winds up being exceptionally easy to create confusing labels. As we thought about this feature, we noticed that other software attaches labels to points without any concern for the location of other labels, making it very easy to create a situation where several labels pile confusingly on top of each other.

So we invested significant amounts of time constructing a label placement algorithm to make it impossible to place one label on top of another.

To use labels, type in any coordinate pair and then click “Show Label.” Give it a try!

This is the last Friday Fave for 2016, as the Fave and colleagues are taking some time to rest and recuperate in preparation for a new year, new features, new activities, and above all new learning.

2016 finishes with a recently upgraded activity that began life as a really nice set of challenges from Lauren Olson, and is now a substantially different beast incorporating the best of what we’ve learned in a year-and-a-half of Activity Builder lesson design. The Friday Fave points you to Circle Patterns.

In the original, students were given the task of writing equations for circles that include some points and exclude others. The update asks students what a set of circles has in common, then challenges them to graph a new circle that also has this characteristic.

We vary the properties of the circles in ways that give students interesting things to notice, and classrooms interesting things to talk about. (The Friday Fave was delighted to notice itself stopping and thinking for a while about what these circles might have in common, for example.)

Legitimate challenges that students can view, and then solve, from several perspectives make Circle Patterns a true Friday Fave.