We have some important news that we’re excited to share with all of you.

The Desmos you know is splitting into two entities: Desmos Studio, a Public Benefit Corporation that develops our free calculators, and Desmos Classroom, the creators of our curriculum and activity platform.

The curriculum part of Desmos is then joining forces with Amplify, an education company we’ve been proud to partner with for many years. The team developing everything at teacher.desmos.com (our free activities, the free Activity Builder, and Desmos Math 6-A1) will join Amplify as a division called Desmos Classroom.

For our community of teachers, learners, mathematicians, and creators, we are continuing to support all of our existing products, and everything that is free will remain free, now and always. Desmos Studio and Desmos Classroom will also remain tightly collaborative. We will continue doing the same work, committed to the same ideals, now with more resources to improve our products and serve more communities.

What does this mean for Desmos Classroom?

The Desmos Classroom + Amplify partnership will help us make Desmos Math 6-A1 available to more students and teachers. This means our shared vision of a creative and connected math education can become a reality for every student, rather than a select few, and that’s why we’re so incredibly excited about this work ahead.

Amplify and Desmos have been traveling on parallel paths for several years and we believe we can go farther together. We have both been creating math curricula based on the Illustrative Mathematics core curriculum. We have both been using core Desmos technology to do it. Both of our teams share the same unique understanding of the complexity of teaching, an appreciation for the brilliance of students, and a commitment to the inclusion of students who often feel pushed to the margins of math class.

Desmos has a proven model for helping students learn math and love learning math with technology. Amplify has a proven model for supporting students, teachers, schools, and districts at scale. We have decided we need each other’s strengths in order to help every student learn math and love learning math.

What does this mean for Desmos Studio?

By remaining independent, Desmos Studio will be able to focus all of its energy on building the most equitable, accessible, powerful, and delightful tools for exploring mathematics. Desmos Studio will continue to partner with the best publishers, platforms, and assessments around the world. The revenue from those partnerships will let us keep investing in our calculators and support our development of new tools.

Desmos Studio will reincorporate as a Public Benefit Corporation, formalizing our commitment to the people who use and rely on our tools, and formalizing our commitment to equity and accessibility as uncompromising values.

More than 75 million people use Desmos Studio tools today. The calculators are integrated into almost every state test and college entrance exam. Communities have sprung up on Reddit, Tiktok, and Discord, sharing ideas and exercising creativity beyond our wildest imagination. By forming Desmos Studio, we will be able to grow with and alongside this community for years to come.

What does this mean for you?

If you love tools like our graphing calculator, we have good news. The team at Desmos Studio is now 100% focused on their development, with lots of resources and a long list of your feature requests in front of them.

If you love Activity Builder and other free tools at teacher.desmos.com, we have good news. They will continue to be free, continue to power our curriculum, and continuously improve.

If you love our math curriculum, we have good news. Together with Amplify, we are continuing to sell and support it now and into the future. It will receive more attention and more resources than before, letting us develop learning supports we’ve always wanted to provide but couldn’t when we were operating independently. It’s a great time to get in touch with our team and learn more about our curriculum.

If you love people who work at Desmos, we have good news. We are all still working at either Desmos Classroom or Desmos Studio, all of us committed to the same mission that brought us to Desmos in the first place.

This is a new chapter in the Desmos story, and I hope you’ll keep turning pages with us. The action is just starting.

Note: this post was edited August 2023 for clarity and to reflect the new branding of Desmos Math 6-A1.

Desmos wants to help every student learn math and love learning math. To accomplish that goal, we build math activities for students, and we build them to the specifications in this document.

Our design code folds in our collective understanding of mathematics, identity, culture, curriculum, cognition, and pedagogy. Together, these ideas can increase the likelihood that a student will come to identify themselves as a “math person.”¹

We intend this document to be descriptive of choices we have already made and prescriptive for choices we will make in the future. When we have doubts about our design decisions, we use this document to settle them. We share these principles publicly in case they’re of use to you and, especially, so you’ll hold us accountable if we fail to meet them.

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