Desmos Fellows Day 2
Well today was incredible: Desmos created an excellent agenda full of high-quality, engaging presentations and I cannot wait to try out all the new things to see what I can incorporate in my classes.
Before I begin though, shout-out to my Cohort 6 Desmos Fellows! And a big thank you to the previous cohorts of fellows who joined us this weekend to help set the tone, share their experiences, and bring lots of fun to our time together.
Here are my reflections, in no particular order, of things I learned today:
One key thing to note about “Desmos” that I truly understand now is the difference between “Desmos Studio graphing calculator” and “Amplify Desmos Math.” One of the presentations was on the history of Desmos, where it stands now, and where it is moving in the future.
Desmos was founded in 2012, my first year of teaching. Activity Builder began in 2015, along with the first Desmos Fellows cohort.
Computation Layer was released in 2018, and Desmos Curriculum was piloted in 2019.
The first Desmos art contest was in 2020, and Desmos joined Amplify in 2022 (I clearly remember getting this announcement in my email)
I had no idea how robust the Desmos grade 6 - Algebra I curriculum was. Kelly Serpa spoke about all the resources for the new K-5 curriculum coming out soon, including the teacher editions, student editions, and manipulatives. It was great to see how Desmos included print/paper as well, especially for the younger grades, so they wouldn’t be on screens all day every day (this is something I’m very conscious of as a parent of a young teenager and 4-year-old).
I think one of the coolest parts of the day was seeing Eli Luberoff in person and hearing his presentation. Eli is the founder of Desmos and the current CEO of Desmos Studio. You could see his excitement and enthusiasm for his game-changing product as he spoke. He spoke about the upcoming developments he is working on with his team, and I am so excited to see what they come up with.
After lunch, we broke up into two smaller breakout groups for hands-on demonstrations and practice using two key parts of Desmos: Computation Layer and Polypad. Dave Poras led the session on Polypad, which I’ve heard a lot about but never used. We got to play around with it using several different Desmos activities and I couldn’t believe how many features are included in this tool. Also, every single object in Polypad be animated and personalized to fit the needs of the lesson. The toggles in Authoring Mode is another amazing feature that I need to spend more time on to master it.
Kurt Salisbury and Schuyler Alschuler led the session on Computation Layer (CL), which I desperately needed since this is something I’ve played around with but am still not confident using.
Another teacher and I were working our way through some CL practice and generally struggling when someone showed us how we can quickly access CL tutorials, help, and examples to use as a reference. Anytime you’re creating an activity in the activity builder, you can click on the green circle on the upper right-hand side of every component.
This will open the window to type in the CL code. To the right-hand side you will see a column like below.
Click on the ‘Documentation’ link (something I never paid attention to before) to open an ENTIRE WEBSITE filled with documents and examples on every component available in the activity builder. A lot of teachers who create activities using CL pull from these examples and use them as building blocks in their code.
Another session I found was intriguing was Bob Janes’ presentation pairing Building Thinking Classrooms (BTC) with Desmos. I use both of these frequently in my classroom, and I’ve often wondered if they were conflicting methods or not. Bob showed how these can be viewed as complementary tools that have many similarities, and I’m going to try out some of the strategies he suggested. He also suggested we look at each lesson we use and decide if a computer enhances it or if it should be analog, and if the lesson is one single task or a series of thin-slicing tasks.
A few other resources that I discovered today are:
Amplify Desmos Music generator tool: This was something I had briefly heard of online, but never explored at all. There are people creating entire songs, with numerous instruments, using Desmos tools. It kind of reminded me of GarageBand music builder, but with lots of fractions! We learned how we can create a single sound on Desmos Graphing Calculator, or two tones at once, or a changing tone with a slider, but I need to look into these music tools a lot more since I got an error. Either way, super cool new feature of Desmos!
Desmos GEOMETRY tool: I had already heard of this, but since I don’t teach Geometry, I haven’t been able to easily incorporate it. However, we went through THIS publicly available Desmos activity and it gave me some ideas on how I can incorporate the construction tools as warm-ups in my Desmos activities or as somewhat non-curricular tasks at the beginning of the school year to get students thinking and talking about math in general. Even something as simple as this challenge, which only involves line segments and circles, was fun to work on.
Fawn Nguyen’s Visual Patterns website. These visual patterns were created by her and others to help students describe functions using numbers, pictures, symbols, and words. I was not very familiar with Fawn Nguyen’s work before, but I am sure I will notice her name going forward; she is very well-known and respected in the math and education community.
Jenna Laib’s Slow-Reveal Graphs website. One that immediately caught my eye, because well, she’s all over the world and news right now, involves the amount of swear words in Taylor Swift’s albums over time. The slow-reveal graph GOOGLE SLIDE was inspired by THIS POST on Joe Hovde’s data-driven blog.
The Google Slide ends up looking like this after slowing building it up and adding more details and information. Each Google Slide on Jenna’s site also includes suggested teacher questions to foster student discussion.
Affer some closing remarks, we had a little time to get ready for dinner at a nearby restaurant, FlyteCo, which is in the bottom floors of an old flight control tower. Me and a group of fellows walked over together and I got a chance to talk to Bob Lochel, a longtime teacher of AP Statistics who was just at the in-person reading as a table leader. He is very knowledge on the AP exams in general, where they are heading in the future, and the issues facing Texas Instruments calculators. For decades, TI had a monopoly because their calculators were the approved tool to use on all the important, high-stakes tests. This is no longer true, but it took many years to change. I had no idea that CollegeBoard had recently switched to using Desmos Calculators on its exams rather than TI. The SAT and PSAT also now incorporate Desmos in their exam.
Now that the exams are virtual (any AP Exam that is still currently paper, like Calculus, will very soon be digital), it is a natural move to incorporate Desmos’ online calculators. I read up more on this because it is going to drastically change how I teach. THIS article was especially interesting:
For as long as I can remember, TI has always ruled the land of math education, and I have always spend significant amounts of time teaching students to use their graphing calculators with as much fluency as their smartphones. For my AP calculus classes, we use the TI-84’s almost every day. It is a serious disadvantage if a student cannot use a graphing calculator fluently since 1/3 of the AP calculus exam requires a graphing calculator. If Desmos is now going to be used on the AP STEM exams, I won’t need to spend all this time in class practicing the countless required skills, and students can use Desmos, which we already use for explorations and which is so much more intuitive to use. I won’t need to ask students to buy the calculator anymore and I won’t need to manage my numbered class set of TI-84 calculators in my hanging shoe organizer. I will need to change the “required materials” section on my syllabus. This is actually mind-blowing to me as a high school math teacher who has ALWAYS used TI calculators! Who knows what the future of Texas Instruments graphing calculators will be, but for now I am excited that I can lean even more into incorporating Desmos Studio and Desmos Classroom in my AP Calculus classes.
One final shoutout to my Uber airport ride-share group, the first Fellows I met this weekend!
I am so grateful to Amplify Desmos for choosing me to be a part of the Desmos Fellows Cohort 6, and I am proud to be a part of this extremely dedicated, creative, dynamic group.