Welcome to a series of posts sharing how we #Desmosify the curriculum from Open Up Resources/Illustrative Mathematics. You can use this lesson for free, experience it in a live show next week, or sign up to get many more activities just like it in our core middle school curriculum!

Here’s how we #Desmosified an Open Up Resources/IM lesson about fitting lines to data.

Desmosification #1: Collect and connect student creativity.

In the original lesson, students draw a line based on data that are tightly correlated and then loosely correlated. Ideally, they’d notice how the spread of the data makes fitting a line easier and harder.

“Compare [your lines] with a partner’s,” asks the lesson, a question which under really good conditions will result in useful learning. But what if your partner hasn’t drawn a line yet? What if you and your partner have a very similar or very different line? What if you’re learning virtually during a pandemic?!

On Desmos, we ask students to draw the two lines and then … we collect and connect all of them.

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