Des-blog

Over the last year, we’ve developed some powerful new tools for classrooms. With all those advances, we’ve needed to revisit our company goals, our terms of service, and our privacy policy.

First, the goal: Desmos wants to help every student learn math and love learning math. That goal isn’t new for us.

We understand our limits, though. We’re a small handful of designers, engineers, and teachers. For us to come anywhere close to that goal, we need to enlist the teachers of all those students, or rather invite those teachers to enlist us. We need to connect those teachers and all their efforts through curriculum, code, and community.

Here are some updates on our efforts:

Activity Builder & Search

We have designed a small handful of activities ourselves – lessons like Function Carnival and Polygraph. Those efforts will continue. We have been dazzled, though, by the outpouring of creativity and pedagogical innovation in our Activity Builder, even in that tool’s infancy.

We want to help every teacher find the best activities built by every other teacher, both so teachers can learn from each other and also so teachers don’t unnecessarily duplicate their efforts. Teachers can currently share their activities with anybody, anywhere, through emails, tweets, and blog posts. But now teachers can also search through the community’s activities. Our three faculty members – Christopher Danielson, Michael Fenton, and Dan Meyer – are combing through every activity created, curating them, and polishing them in collaboration with their authors. They’re available for search and use now.

Legal & Financial

Until today, we haven’t articulated terms around use of the Activity Builder. We built and released the tool without clearly stating what it will cost to use that tool or what will happen to everything you create with that tool. That lack of clarity may have inhibited the growth and vibrancy of our community and we’re changing that today.

Of course you should read our updated terms of use, but here are some important points which we hope will allow this community to continue to flourish:

• We won’t ever sell your activities without your permission. If your activities are public, anyone can use them without cost. We are creating a community, not a marketplace.
• While we’re still uncertain where the Activity Builder fits into our plan for long-term sustainability, we can promise this: we won’t ever charge you to edit or use your existing activities. If you’ve built it for free, you will always be able to edit it and run it for free.
• If you make your activity public, you are saying, “Yes, I want to participate in this community.” Community participation requires that you allow anyone to copy your activity and make edits to that copy. People will eventually be able to add screens, change screens, correct misspellings, and localize it, either for their native language or particular class of students. Desmos teaching faculty can also copy it and make polishes to bring it in line with our house style for inclusion in our search results. You will always receive credit on the copied activity’s landing page. Additionally, anyone who copies your activity must allow other people to copy that activity – share and share alike.
  

We have subjected all of these community expectations – both what we promise to our community members and what membership in that community requires – to debate inside and outside Desmos. We have been grateful, throughout that process, for our critical friends who have pushed us to develop and articulate these ideals. Now we ask for your support and encouragement to live up to them.

by Christopher

This summer, we launched Activity Builder—a tool for teachers to use to build Desmos-based lessons to use in their classrooms. The community of online math (and other!) teachers has been tremendously creative in response.

We wanted to make this creativity available to a wider audience, so we recently introduced search on teacher.desmos.com.

In order to make search maximally useful, we have engaged in a curation process we call polishing. Basically, we go through every Activity Builder activity that teachers create, look to see whether they have agreed to share these activities, and then edit them before making them searchable. Polishing involves proofreading, applying stylistic touches for consistency, and adding or rearranging screens.

Some activities get a light touch; others undergo substantial changes. We check in with the original authors to be sure they are still happy to have their names on the final product before we release it. (Also Jenny makes it a really sweet logo!)

From time to time we’ll feature an activity and what we find interesting or useful about each one.

Today, I’ll tell you about a tiny little activity from David Cox.

Where’s 2/3? is not going to consume an entire class period in anybody’s classroom. But its simple structure is delightful. If you want to learn to use words effectively, study Maurice Sendak. If you want to learn to use tech effectively, study the simple things.

Here’s the structure.

1. Question: How does 2/3 relate to 1?

2. Do it: Put 2/3 on the number line.

3. Reflection question: How did you know where to put it?

Engage kids’ minds with a simple question that sets up the next thing, but that has low stakes. Have them do a thing with a simple tool. Ask them to justify.

In polishing, I experimented with a new interaction. David’s original lesson has the red dot pinned to the number line. I wanted to provide a couple of reference points for students to use (maybe they want to subdivide into thirds first?)

Putting multiple dots on the number line was confusing, so I put them above the number line for kids to place like stickers. A little hocus pocus makes it so those points are easy to put ON the number line.

Maybe you like the pinned-points better? No problem! You can make that version for yourself in about four minutes**. And you’ll learn a couple things along the way. (Also, soon you’ll be able to make a copy of an existing activity and edit it, rather than start from scratch. Very soon. But not today.)

The hocus pocus is simply setting limits on the sliders. Click the triangle next to the word “Use” in the expressions list to see the draggable-point mechanics.

**Or hit me on Twitter—@Trianglemancsd. I’ll build it for you!

Counting large numbers of little things is tedious work.

Sixth graders know there has to be a better way—one that is faster and more efficient. They don’t always know that algebra is that better way; a gateway to a new set of methods. They almost certainly don’t know that proportional relationships are a key that unlocks that algebra gate.

That’s why we built Tile Pile in collaboration with partners Illustrative Mathematics and Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium. Tile Pile challenges students to calculate the number of tiles needed to tile a large floor, and gives students a powerful mathematical tool—a ratio table—for doing these calculations.

Hey Sixth-Grader! we say. You found the number of tiles in 4 square feet. How many in 20 square feet? How do you know?

And then we don’t let them rest on their laurels. We make them think about how other students got their answers. Because collaboration, that’s why!

Possibilities include (but may not be limited to):

• Multiply the number of tiles in 4 square feet by 5.
• Add the number of tiles in four square feet to the number of tiles in sixteen square feet.
  
• Multiply 20 by the number of tiles in one square foot (the unit rate!)

Ideas, like seeds, are planted. Then, like seeds, these ideas grow in the fertile ground of the (approx.) 11-year-old mind. Students reason their way to a total number of tiles. They fix Lusenia’s table. They learn about the constant of proportionality.

Then students put their feet up, take a long drink of cool water, get the thumbs-up from their coworkers and enjoy the satisfaction of a job well done.

Good work, sixth-graders! We’ll see you in seventh grade when y=kx rolls around.

So teachers, what are you waiting for? That floor won’t tile itself. Click on through and try Tile Pile out now.