List of activities sourced (mostly through twitter), that (I fear!) may not appear in regular Desmos search engine…
First up though is this fantastic intro to showcase what Activity Builder can do in desmos. A good one for showing to others who might be interested… Here is another page a teacher compiled when they were running PD’s introducing people to Desmos. OK, now onto the activities:
- Area of rectangles – Students learn how to find the area of a rectangle given a grid and side lengths. There formula (A=lw) is not mentioned in this lesson and can be brought up in a class discussion
- Home run kings – Using data to make predictions, using statistics / graphs
- Talkers and drawers is an informal pair activity on linear relationships. They have one too on periodic functions and one on quadratic relations (Mr Orr’s site covering all three and some explanation is here).
- MAGIC! Showing how multi-step equations can be used to work out someone’s chosen ‘mystery’ number.
- Get close to me is a rounding activity (that came from using clothesline maths too).
- Wolves and sheep is just a fun puzzle, not necessarily curriculum linked.
- Another puzzle on desmos is the Twin Puzzles, which is a good order of operations task (googling desmos and puzzle might return more ideas too…)
NB> since order of operations mentioned above, here’s a pic to show on the topic!
- The ‘chormagons‘ activity just looks like an interesting exploration
- This one is on completing the square
- In ‘zero and negative exponents‘ students use Desmos “Sketch” to generate patterns to explore zero as an exponent and negative exponents – something students have often struggled with (tag: indices, powers too)
- Here is an introduction to domain and range
- This one helps with writing linear equations from a graph.
- And another one on equations, assessing understanding of y = mx + c
- Activity on using a number line to help with the concept of multiplying integers.
- This one explores the idea of linear equations and a card sort on whether equations are parallel or perpendicular to a given line too.
- Here is one on modelling with 400m times from Olympics.
- Another modelling activity/lesson (not desmos) is Robert k’s one on math modelling predicting pregnancy! (includes a link in the opening paragraph to other activities around spies etc too!)
- Rogue planes is about changing the cartesian plane, rather than the line, for linear equations
- Chance experiments I used as a good introduction to probability with year 8’s (designing spinners, using language etc.)
- Puzzling it out helps students solve angle puzzles to apply what they’ve learned about angle relationships and to informally learn the Triangle Sum theorem.
- One for focusing on translation of standard y=x^2 parabola. Then there is this one like the old snake game transitioning from linear to parabolas, hyperbolas etc.
- Categorical Data: Frequency and relative frequency uses data from the titanic and a good ‘story’ development in the activity
- A ‘repair shop’ activity where students compare linear and exponential growth in the context of daily payments
- This ‘Under the Sea‘ looks like a great newer task for introducing linear and exponential functions to make predictions.
- ‘Sketchy dilations‘ introduces students to dilations/ratio through experimenting with “sketching machines” that allow them to adjust various parts of a drawing to see the effect on the pre-image
- This is a clothesline activity on desmos exploring fractions, decimals, percentages…
- Here’s a page that links to Andrew Stadel’s database of desmos activities that he’s created (estimation 180 guy)
- This one links to a Google sheet of John Orr’s tasks – many which are not searchable in Desmos.
- This page links to a set of activities created by John Rowe – titles certainly look good and seem to cover some higher level maths ideas (like derivatives/differentiation inc. first principles(!), completing the square, quadratics… as well as pythagoras etc)
- Finding desmo is a newer task which takes students on a journey exploring standard deviation.
Why do I like desmos?? Well, along with the cheers I hear around the room when students succeed at a task, here are two quotes from a relatively tough to teach bunch in 2016:
I reckon desmos is way better than bookwork, we should do it every lesson
Can we please keep going with desmos