Today our friends at Desmos released an update of their Activity Builder editor. You can head to teacher.desmos.com now and explore the changes – edit a previous activity, create a new one OR copy screens from activities in the library of Desmos activities.
The first thing I noticed about the updated editor was the increased freedom in screen design. Previously, elements like Graph, Note and Input were limited in their placement and number. There is more freedom now to move elements around, order them as you like, and include more of them in a single screen.
Immediately I wanted to explore this new freedom and think about intentionality in my design process for an activity I wrote and used in my AP Stats class this spring – Is My Die Fair. In this activity students “roll” both a virtual hand-made die and a virtual real die. The activity allows students to discover the chi-squared statistic as a reasonable measure of variability in a categorical distribution. Here are two ways I changed this activity with the new editor, with the intent that students will be able to follow the narrative with less arrowing through the activity.
ORIGINAL VERSION:
Screen 2: students roll the hand-made die 60 times
Screen 3: results are copied from screen 2 and students make observations.
NEW VERSION:
Students roll the die AND make a conjecture on the same screen.
Another place I was able to leverage the new block placement freedom occurred later when students begin to think about the computation of the chi-squared statistic.
ORIGINAL VERSION:
Screen 8: the new statistic is explained, and students complete a table for the homemade die only.
Screen 9: a summary statistic is shown, and students now complete the table for the real die.
Screen 10: both summary statistics are shown and students make a final conjecture about the dice.
NEW VERSION:
Screen 7: the new statistic is explained, and students complete tables for both types of dice on the same screen.
Screen 8: both summary statistics are shown and students make a final conjecture about the dice.
Share your ideas for altering your previous activities to leverage the new design freedoms. Below, you can test-drive both activities and see how I altered them. Your ideas are always appreciated…now get building!
“Is My Die Fair” – original version – https://teacher.desmos.com/activitybuilder/custom/5e713346f6e84e7dd46727fd
“Is My Die Fair” – version 2 –https://teacher.desmos.com/activitybuilder/custom/5ef38c6cad9e310dc0a6ac23
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