![]() How fast should each animal move? What distance should we use for the entire race? When and for how long should the hare rest? We wanted something that felt realistic if you look closely at the numbers. We agonized over the details of the race. Behind the Scenesĭesmos lesson developer Michael Fenton describes one of the core design dilemmas of the lesson and how our team found our way through it. Students can then decide if the dog did what they wanted it to do and make modifications accordingly. And rather than give students binary feedback-right or wrong-which often fails to credit them for their abundant brilliant thinking even in a wrong answer, we just render the dog they created in the animation. We ask students to create a specific dog-one with a head start that still loses the race, for example. We invite students to create a race between the tortoise and a dog using a graph. Desmosification #2: Give feedback that causes thinking.Īnother advantage of this context is that because it’s a digital animation, we can invite students to control its different elements using their own thinking. ![]() ![]() It’s only much later in the activity, after the context has been enriched by the students’ own intuitions, that we ask for any precise, numerical analysis. The hare is in the lead and and he stops and sleeps and the turtle wins. The psychobiological conflict between two species?! Are they noticing speed? The hare’s nap in the middle. This is an opportunity for teachers to learn what details are most salient for students. We start by asking students to tell a story about what they see. So in our activity, we chose acontext that has several advantages for students-a race between a tortoise and a hare. One of our core commitments in designing curriculum is to invite students to use their voice, vision, touch, and intuition in mathematical analysis, all components of what Rochelle Gutierrez describes as “ rehumanized mathematics.” If an activity invites students to access and apply their intuition about a context, it strengthens both their later numerical analysis and their sense of themselves as capable mathematicians with valuable ideas. The activity immediately asks students to analyze the graph of a context precisely and numerically, but students have not yet had opportunities to develop and understand the context concretely. In the original activity, Open Up Resources/Illustrative Mathematics starts with a context about temperature. Desmosification #1: Create concrete connections. Here’s how we #Desmosified an Open Up Resources/ IM lesson to help students students interpret graphs of functions. You can use this lesson for free, or sign up to get many more activities just like it in our core middle school curriculum! Welcome to a series of posts sharing how we #Desmosify the curriculum from Open Up Resources/Illustrative Mathematics.
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