Friday, February 21, 2014

Making a Face with DESMOS.com

If you haven't worked with desmos yet, you are missing out.  It is so easy and intuitive.  The students will catch on so easily.  Here is the in class assignment I gave today.  This was a precalculus class.  You can easily adjust this for any high school math class.

This was a student's work was done in 15 minutes of class time.  There is so much math here too.  
Click on it to get the animation.
  

Sign up with desmos.com and make a face using the free online calculator.

Your face must include these things:
1.  A circle or ellipse
2.  A line
3.  A sin or cos wave
4.  A slider
5.  A parabola
Now post your face in a link to this website:  http://tinyurl.com/nchsprecalculus6

Please go to this site to see all the wonderful examples that my students made.  They will make you smile.

Here are some questions that I had today.
How do you make the sin wave go vertical instead of sideways?
How do you move the circle from the center?
How do you restrict the x values so they don't always show?
How do you make a circle bigger?
How do I make this parabola wider?

Take 15 minutes and make a face today and you will see how much math DESMOS has.  Now this was a fun class.  The students were really active in their pursuit of the math topics. Please try this and let me know how it goes.
Dave




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2 comments:

  1. Ramsey WillisFebruary 23, 2014 at 6:40 PM

    Hi Dave

    This is Ramsey Willis again and this new posting is just amazing. I love the way you made learning functions and graphs fun for the students. I viewed a number of them and could see the creativity in your students. I especially liked Sarah Shapley's with the moving eyes...creepy but creative, lol. They were all different and all interesting in their own way. This seems like something I may be able to do with my classroom in the future. I have seen Desmos before and have played with it a little but never like that. I will definitely give it a try now and post my face to the site as you suggested. Thanks again for your wonderful ideas and fun. Have a very fun and blessed week!

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  2. Holly ShawMarch 15, 2014 at 4:32 PM

    Dave,
    Thank you for introducing me to such a cool application. I love how students are able to learn about functions in an interactive way. I loved Tara Ramni's
    Funny Lil Grandpa" example! I believe Desmos makes the learning less dull and more exciting. I am a huge math geek (proud of it) and I can remember being slightly bored when learning this material. From what I have seen I believe that this application is something I could very easily see myself using in the future.

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