Archive of posts filed under the Technology category.

## An Introduction to Desmos

I’ve presented on Desmos many times to teachers, administrators, and students.  So I was excited to bring that experience to the Math for America community through my workshop, An Introduction to Desmos, at the MfA offices in New York City.

Nearly 50 MfA teachers attended, and it was a very active and engaged bunch.  Most attendees were familiar with Desmos, and many were using it in their classrooms.  But I got the sense that everyone’s eyes were opened a bit wider to the power and possibility of this mathematical technology.

Participants began by working through a document I’ve put together that functions as a guided tour of Desmos.  I’ve used this document many times with both teachers and students:  it provides a quick overview of the power and breadth of the functionality of Desmos, and it allows me to circulate and answer, and ask, questions.  [You can find the document here: Introduction to Desmos]

The second part of the workshop had participants working on a series of content-specific challenges.  The goal was to use get teachers using Desmos to build mathematical objects.  For example, some teachers worked through these parabola challenges:

Construct an arbitrary parabola
(a) with vertex (2,3)
(b) with vertex $(x_1, y_1)$
(c) with roots 2 and 3
(d) with roots $r_1$ and $r_2$
(f) with focus $(a,b)$ and directrix $y = c$

There were similarly structured challenges for LinesTransformations, Regions, and several other areas.  Participants could choose what to work on based on what they taught or what they were interested in.

As I circulated the room, I answered lots of good questions.  And I listened in as teachers talked about how they were already using Desmos in their classrooms.  I was especially gratified to hear several teachers tell me that they learned something in the workshop that would have made yesterday’s lesson better.  It felt good to deliver immediate impact to my colleagues, and I’m excited to know that many teachers have already integrated Desmos into their instruction.

Throughout the workshop I emphasized that the real power of Desmos is not as a presentation tool, but as a creative tool.  I often describe Desmos as a mathematical makerspace:  a place where we can design and build using the tools and techniques of mathematics.  As teachers, it’s tempting to see Desmos primarily as a tool for demonstrating mathematics to our students, but it’s true power lies in how it can help us all, teachers and students alike, make mathematics.

You can find more of my work with Desmos here.  And you can see pictures of the workshop here.

## Student Desmos Projects

Desmos, the free, browser-based graphing utility, has quickly become an indispensable tool in the mathematics classroom.  It provides easy, intuitive access to graphs of functions and relations, and creates unique opportunities to understand mathematical relationships dynamically.

But to me, its greatest virtue may be that Desmos provides opportunities to use mathematics to create.  I like to think of Desmos as a mathematical makerspace, where the tools at our disposal are exactly the tools of mathematics.

To that end, when I introduce students to Desmos, we always work toward the creation of something mathematical.  Below are some beautiful examples of student work from our latest round of Desmos projects.

You can find more of my work with Desmos here.

## 3D Printed Surfaces

I’ve been enjoying getting familiar with our new 3D printer.  I’m not sure these parametric surfaces were the best pieces to start out with, but I have learned a lot!

From left to right, we have a figure eight torus, a Fresnel surface, and a cyclide.  Not pictured:  the many, many failures.

## When Technology Fails

At Math for America’s most recent Master Teachers on Teaching event, I presented “When Technology Fails”, a short talk about how my personal and professional experiences have shaped the way I view and teach technology.

The failure of technology has been a consistent part of my personal and professional computing experience.  These failures have served as excellent learning opportunities, and perhaps more importantly, they have instilled in me a healthy distrust of technology.

As a teacher, I find students far too trusting of technology.  Often, they accept what their calculators or computers tell them unthinkingly.  In my talk, I discuss how we can make students conscious of the shortcomings of technology in ways that create meaningful learning opportunities.  And hopefully, by confronting the failures of technology head on, students will develop a healthier attitude about what technology can, and can’t, do.

A video of “When Technology Fails” can be viewed here.  And a talk I gave at a previous MT^2 event, “g = 4, and Other Lies the Test Told Me”, can be seen here.

## Circumcircles in Desmos

I’m presenting on Desmos at today’s AMAPS meeting in New York City, and preparing my talk was an object lesson in how wonderful this technology is.

Part of my presentation demonstrates simple ways that Desmos can be a part of every high school math class:  Algebra, Geometry, Trigonometry, Pre-Calculus, and Calculus.  While Geogebra is generally more suitable for demonstrating and exploring geometry, Desmos certainly can be useful in that course, so I wanted to show something relevant and interesting as part of my talk.  I thought, “Why not compute the circumcircle for an arbitrary triangle?”

While all the pieces of the mathematical puzzle were there for me, figuring out how to put them together in Desmos was a fun, frustrating, and worthwhile challenge.  I had to play around with the basic concepts associated with perpendicular bisectors and think creatively about some mathematical problems and equations.  I even ended up using the new regression feature in Desmos in a clever way!

I often get caught up in little challenges like this, and this is why Desmos is so wonderful:  it provides us a mathematical makerspace.  It invites us to play around, to create, to engineer, to build.  And all of this happens through using the language and concepts of mathematics.

You can see my circumcircle demonstration here, and you can find more of my work in Desmos here.