Des-blog

by Christopher Danielson, Desmos Teaching Faculty

From time to time, we highlight one or more Activity Builder activities here on the Des-blog. Today it’s a little one I made a while back, adapted from a low-tech activity I’ve used in my College Algebra classroom a number of times.

It’s quick, it’s easy to run, and it generates fascinating conversation among students. It’s instruction and formative assessment wrapped in a tight 15-minute package.

Anyone who teaches a course that involves discussing the domain and range of functions should give it a whirl. Here’s why.

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At Desmos, a company principle is, design for delight.

And we have designed something new and delightful for your classroom: Marbleslides.

You see four stars on the screen, and part of a parabola.

You click “Launch”, and marbles are released. They slide down the parabola, up into the first quadrant, through the stars, and fall away off the bottom of the screen. Delightful.

Delightful and challenging, because soon you’ll need to move that parabola around. And stretch it. And restrict its domain.

You’re going to get very good very quickly at resizing, repositioning, and restricting the domains of parabolas in order to match the graphs on the screen to the images in your mind.

You’ll laugh. You’ll cheer. You’ll pump your fist and raise the roof.

Go try it out. It’s delightful.

p.s. Marbleslides for lines, periodics, rationals, and exponentials are ready for classrooms, too.

by Dan Meyer

Shelley Carranza is a math coach in Northern California and uses our free Activity Builder as much as anybody we know. Previously, she has posted a long list of activities mapped to the free EngageNY curriculum. In a recent post, she has offered her top four tips for making great use of those activities in the classroom, starting with:

Open up the teacher dashboard on an iPad or tablet so that you can monitor student work as you circulate the class. During my last lesson I also kept a post-it note with me so I could take down names of student work to share with the class during debrief time. Doing this also helped me decide when we should debrief and keep track of time.