Tuesday, February 11, 2014

Desmos' Function Carnival!

I came across Function Carnival on twitter a couple nights ago and instantly knew it was going to be great in class. This is what technology in a math class should look like. We aren't throwing more practice at kids but are instead slowing it down, providing them a tool that creates the conversations more naturally and motivates them to explore the 'what ifs' when factors are changed. Embedded is also a reflection tool that shows students an example of another (fictional) student and asks them what the student is thinking or saying with the graph they have created.


On the teacher side I get a dashboard of every student computer, what graphs they have created and even their short response answers to those reflection questions. I had so many kids today talking about what they saw and wanting to show me their work and how well they did. This is what math education should look like as we begin to acquire more classroom technology. It is not (as I've heard in staff development) having a bin of worksheets available for students that finish the basic stuff early. It is conversations, exploration and connections to potential real life situations.

Student graphs after completion

I don't know much of the background as to how this came about but if it was truly a collaboration between Desmos.com and Dan Meyer I'm very excited for the work to come from that relationship! Thanks so much and looking forward to the future work to come!

2 comments:

  1. I LOVE this video. Love, love, love it. Thanks so much for sharing, Andy!

    As the third wheel on the development of Function Carnival, I can report that (1) it was a highly collaborative process, and (2) we have more on the way!

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    1. Thanks--glad to hear you were part of it too and to hear that more is planned! My kids were asking for more at the end of the day for sure. The structure of just being able to get a group of student graphs together and displayed over each other is neat too. I'm hoping for an open ended structure to come so the teacher could draw the graph template (for the precision measurement) and ask the question--not sure from a programming standpoint how doable that is though...Thinking like integrating the tool into the graphingstories.com platform/concept.

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