Comments on: Marbleslides Is Here

By: Marie-HÃ©lÃ¨ne Simard

Marie-HÃ©lÃ¨ne Simard — Fri, 25 Nov 2016 20:17:30 +0000

This is such a great activity!!! Some students have created crazy and original slides so remarkable that I would like to put them as an hyperlink for others to see. How can we do that?

By: Dan Meyer

Dan Meyer — Wed, 03 Feb 2016 23:04:49 +0000

@Jake, soon enough. Thanks for the feedback.

By: Jake Hirsch

Jake Hirsch — Wed, 03 Feb 2016 16:01:47 +0000

About to try Marbleslides today with my class. I agree that I’d love to be able to author my own Fix its. I also tried something that sounds similar to Green globs on my own. I gave my Alg I kids some points to aim for and told them to just create lines that go through the points. To work on Domain you could also have points you want to hit and points or walls or other things blocking you that you cannot hit, hoops to jump through. The possibilities seem endless.

By: dy/dan » Blog Archive » Marbleslides Madness!

dy/dan » Blog Archive » Marbleslides Madness! — Sun, 10 Jan 2016 00:25:42 +0000

[…] Watch some students play our new Marbleslides activity. […]

By: Emily

Emily — Wed, 06 Jan 2016 14:29:26 +0000

I have been waiting 20 years for either a Green Globs update or an alternative that is its equal. I have high expectations and cannot wait to play. Thanks.

By: Eric

Eric — Tue, 05 Jan 2016 22:44:40 +0000

@Dave, I’m part of the team at Desmos and can help answer some of those questions. The randomness in the marbles is there partially to make it more interesting / delightful to watch, and partially to encourage students to work on solutions which work for a range of inputs, instead of adjusting little details by tiny amounts until you get the perfect lucky bounce.

It’s also helpful from an implementation perspective because getting exactly the same behavior every time would require absolutely everything about the simulation to be completely locked down. If we tried to reproduce the trajectories exactly, then any kind of tiny change in how we sample the graphs, or in how the computer computes trig functions, or what resolution we run the simulation at would break the results, but with this approach the balls will still be drawn from a similar distribution of trajectories.

By: Dave

Dave — Tue, 05 Jan 2016 20:15:42 +0000

I keep running into inadvertent physics lessons that are blowing my mind.

It seems like there’s a touch of randomness to the individual marbles — designs that depend on marbles flying through the air show the marbles taking slightly different paths, in the same launch and across different launches. Is there any special magic or thoughts you’d like to share behind that apparent randomness? Is it intentional, or a happy accident? Did you find any other fun quirks while putting this together?

By: Rich Malena

Rich Malena — Mon, 21 Dec 2015 02:34:39 +0000

My Pre-Calc students played the polynomial version on Chromebooks and loved it. The best part for me is that they’ve now moved from “let me check my notes” when solving problems and sketching curves, to having these come to mind very quickly after a ton of worthwhile practice. Thanks for putting this together! I plan to use it again as we get deeper into graphing exponentials and periodic functions.

By: Paul Gitchos

Paul Gitchos — Sat, 19 Dec 2015 04:57:48 +0000

Thanks so much for this great math activity. The fun-factor is very high, I think largely because of the realistic marble movement. I used the lines version in Algebra 1, and the parabolas version in Algebra 2, and enjoyed watching highly engaged students who didn’t want to stop when the bell rang. Later in the day the dashboard indicated they were still playing, although they had moved on to other classes.

I will look forward to the editable version!

The number one request from students was a way to create their own challenges, by placing the stars and perhaps adding some “barriers.” Keep up the great work.

By: Joshua

Joshua — Fri, 18 Dec 2015 08:10:54 +0000

Just a quick thanks. This activity is fun as a game, full stop. I think a key factor is that the animation of the marble physics is so well done. Of course, nice that it has value for teaching math.

I couldn’t resist making a bumpy slide out of a sine + linear terms and playing to get the marbles to smoothly glide down the graph.

BTW, I noticed the parabolas activity cautions teachers to look out for students using line segments. Aren’t lines just degenerate parabolas?