Making Visuals with Graphfree
I cannot believe that I have been teaching for 11 years and it wasn’t until this month that I found out about Graphfree, an incredible free website for teachers to make textbook quality, beautiful graphs.
If you teach math and haven’t stumbled upon this gem yet, do yourself a favor and try it out! This is one of the worksheets I just created this month for the AP Calculus Bootcamp class that I taught this week.
PDF version HERE.
I make a lot of my own resources, including quizzes, tests, worksheets, and more. When I first began teaching, I would just copy and paste one of the graph grids from THIS DOCUMENT onto the Word document I was creating. I would then print out the document and hand draw the graphs as neatly as possible. As you can imagine, the quality was sub-par, the lines were never thick enough to really see well, and the handouts just never had that polished, professional look that I wanted.
I discovered Desmos during my second year of teaching in 2014. Back then, Desmos was just a graphing calculator - no activities, no Geometry tools, no Desmos Classroom. But it was free and created beautiful graphs, so I began to use it to create the visuals I needed. I would then snip the graph I had made and paste it onto a Word document. This improved the look of my handouts, but there were some formatting issues I wasn’t happy with.
Let’s say I wanted to use Desmos to created the first piecewise function on the photo above.
My main issue is that I cannot create open and closed dots on the graph, particularly at the endpoints. I can use some of Desmos’ formatting tools to make it more suited for a printed worksheet:
I always make the functions the same color and increase the line thickness so that the functions are easier to distinguish from the axes. I also get rid of the minor gridlines and put a clearly visible scale on the axes:
So this definitely looks cleaner, but the endpoints are still unclear and when I create a snip and paste it on the Word document, the border of my graph is unclear and undefined. This makes the graph look a bit sloppy. The grid lines are also gray and might not show up well when I make copies in school. You cannot change the color of the grid lines on Desmos.
A couple of years later, I tried using Geogebra to create my visuals. I had never considered this website before, because I always thought of it as just a geometry tool. I got the idea on Facebook from another math teacher who creates top-quality resources using the Geogebra graphing tool. As you can see below, Geogebra has a LOT of formatting options for the individual functions as well as the graph grid. I love how I can change the color of the grid lines and make them black or nearly black so that they show up clearly when printed and copied.
The same issue of sloppy borders occurs when snipping and pasting my final graphs from Geogebra. Another big issue - I haven’t found out yet how to graph piecewise well! Let me know in the comments if you successfully do this using Geogebra. Here is what mine looked like:
[I’m not sure if it’s just me, but the Geogebra website has a slightly dated feel to it with some clunky formatting and visuals].
Now that I have finally discovered Graphfree, I don’t think I will ever turn back. My graph visuals have never looked better! Seriously, they look straight from a textbook and they are SO EASY to create! The high quality of this product makes sense because a math teacher created the website, so he would know exactly what us teachers are looking for.
Just look at these incredible, easy-to-locate formatting options! No drop-down menus to click through! Everything you need is right there below each function you enter, and you can easily shift among different graph types (like polar, scatter plot, implicit, etc).
One of my only complaints about Graphfree is that when you enter a function, it doesn’t formate the text nicely with exponents, radicals, or fraction bars, to name a few. See the function I entered in the image below for what I mean:
Overall, though, I highly recommend this tool if you want to improve the quality of your resources and graphs in general!