Aug 2 2015

Desmos Activity Builder

A superb new addition – Desmos have created an activity builder for teachers, this enables the creation of interactive Desmos-based classroom activities. A series of pages can be created – any combination of graphs, questions or text. Having created and saved the activity a code is then associated with that activity which your students enter at student.desmos.com.

CY Desmos Activities

A simple experiment for my first activity – identify the lines x=k and y=k.
Activities are very easy to create, the interface is intuitive; images can very easily be added by dragging them to the page.

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Once students have tried the activity and submitted answers to any questions a teacher can see all their submitted responses. This is certainly something I will be using with my students in the coming academic year. I have various slideshows for Desmos which I can now create activities for. (For more on Desmos, see these pages).
Student

Dec 22 2014

Desmos on Android

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A happy day! Desmos comes to Android and I now have the best handheld graphing calculator I have ever had! As you would expect of Desmos, it just works! Get it on Google play here. (Desmos iOS apps have been available for some time). I will certainly be asking students with Android phones to get the app.

You will find a series of Desmos Slideshows here, (these have been written with students in mind) and more on Desmos on this series of pages.

Photos by David Young

Dec 6 2014

Christmas 2014

See Christmas Resources for the always updated Christmas collection.

Nov 15 2014

Regression

Since I will be studying the Bivariate Data section on one of our Year 13 (UK age 17-18) Statistics modules soon I was rather pleased to see that it is now really easy to use Desmos for Regression. The video shows how simple it it to use.

I tried this with some data from an A level question then also added another expression and table to see the values predicted by the model.

It is also simple to use Excel – just add the data, insert a chart – choose Scatter, then add a trend line.

Regression using Excel

GeoGebra provides us with another option.
Try this ready to use worksheet – find the line of best fit.

From the GeoGebra manual – FitPoly command

For another easy to use tool, we could use the PhET simulation.

…or we could just pop the points into WolframAlpha and have it do all the work to check our calculations!

Sep 20 2014

Desmos – tangents to curve

At the moment I am introducing calculus to my sixth-form classes and I wanted to use Desmos to illustrate drawing a tangent to a curve. A quick search found a page I copied to my own account, I then modified the page to show a simple quadratic (f(x) = x²).

Desmos – tangent to a curve

Something I have been meaning to do for a while is try the folder feature on Desmos, a rather neat way to create a tidy looking set of items.

Desmos page notes

Show / hide folder contents

Folders are easy to create:

Desmos Folders

Desmos – add folder item

Having created a folder, press enter and the next item will be placed in the folder. If you want to add items later, ‘nudge’ your item into the contents of the folder.

I recommend that students use Desmos to help them understand any questions they do; finding the equation of a tangent to a curve is a good example, Desmos can be used very quickly to illustrate a correct (or not!) solution.

For checking calculus examples students can use WolframAlpha, examples are included in the fourth slideshow here).

Update ….and along came @Desmos! (select either picture for graph page)