I haven’t blogged on this site in nearly a year, for personal reasons and I guess I have felt I didn’t have anything worth sharing. I was inspired to get back to it when I saw the MTBoS twitter posts entitled ‘My Favourite’.

I haven’t contributed to this hashtag before (I hope Aussies are welcome), though I have read many excellent blog posts via twitter links.

Without a doubt, my favourite is desmos, which I started using 3 years ago when I had a class of high achievers, that I was always seeking ways to extend. They were an ‘extension’ class of 14 – 15 year olds who had covered linear and quadratic functions the year before, though claimed not to remember much, so I decided on a one-off Friday afternoon lesson. Basically I started by projecting desmos and with my limited creativity, showed them how to  write equations and restrict the domain to draw, I think it was a boat, so all straight lines.

I then said ‘your turn, you know how to draw parabolas, explore’. What an amazing lesson. In no time I was being asked questions like, how do I get a circle, a curve, etc. By the end of the lesson I had introduced the equations of circles and ellipses and how to translate, connecting it to their prior knowledge of quadratic functions. All in response to their ‘need to know’. I don’t think I knew about the sliders then, so translations were meticulously tested to get just the right look. It was a brilliantly differentiated task with some fairly simple drawings and others that blew my mind, with students going home and working on them for hours. I have used this lesson again each year.

Now that desmos have the activity builder, there have been some terrific lessons created. I am so grateful that those creative teachers have been willing to share. I regularly suggest relevant activities to my Maths staff. This year I am hoping to get a small team of teachers together to work with this resource; initially using the activities and linking them into current courses and then hopefully creating their own which can them be shared.