Amy X. Wang, writing in Quartz:

Enter Desmos, a San Francisco-based company that offers a free online version of TI’s graphing calculator. Users across 146 countries, most of them teachers or students, are currently logging 300,000 hours a day on the platform–and today, Desmos announced a major partnership with testing consortium Smarter Balanced, which administers academic exams in 15 US states. Beginning this spring, students in those areas will use the online tool in math classrooms and on statewide performance assessments.

When students take their year-end assessment in 15 states, they’ll see the same free calculator they’ve been using at school and at home the rest of the year. That assessment will more closely reflect what they know, rather than what they were able to express through unfamiliar or costly technology.

USA Today has the reaction quote from Texas Instruments president Peter Balyta:

Peter Balyta, president of TI Education Technology and a former math teacher, defended the purchases, saying a TI calculator “is a one-time investment in a student’s future, taking students through math and science classes from middle school through high school and into college and career.” He said TI’s technology is evolving, but that models like the TI-84 Plus come with “only the features that students need in the classroom, without the many distractions that come with smartphones, tablets and internet access.”

This is interesting. In a world where more and more assessments are delivered digitally (and pre-loaded with digital calculators) the sales pitch for hardware calculators is their lack of features, rather than their abundance.

There is clearly a market today for a calculator that lacks internet access. Around 20% of teachers in my survey said they wouldn’t let students use mobile devices on exams for reasons of “test security” and another 10% cited “distraction.”

Open, interesting questions:

• Are those figures trending upwards or downwards?
• Will schools and parents continue to pay Texas Instruments an estimated 50% profit margin for more test security and fewer distractions?
• How do math coaches and instructional technologists help teachers harness the advantages of the internet while also managing concerns about security and distraction?

2017 May 12. Peter Balyta makes a longer case for hardware calculators, one which won’t surprise anyone who has followed this discussion. He mentions (1) lower cost, (2) fewer distractions, (3) greater test security, (4) more features, and (5) availability on tests.

This is the first of several posts where I’ll use the activities Desmos created last quarter to illustrate our design principles.

One of those principles is:

Create an intellectual need for new mathematical skills.

Nowhere is that principle more necessary, in our view, than in the instruction of algebraic expressions. Three of my least favorite words in the English language are “write an expression” because they so often mean we’re asking the student to do the difficult work of variable manipulation without experiencing any of the fruit of that work.

In both of the questions below, students are likely to experience the work of writing an expression as punishment, not power.

Given the width of the lawnmower (W) and the length of the rope (L), write an expression for the pole radius (R) that will make the lawnmower cut the lawn in a perfect spiral.

Given the width of the pool in tiles (n), write an expression for the number of tiles that will fit around the pool border.

We recognize that one reason variables give us power is that they let us complete lots of versions of the same task quickly and reliably. So in our version of both of the above problems, we asked students first to work numerically, both to acclimate them to the task, but especially to establish the feeling that, “Okay, doing a lot of these could get tedious.”

And then we use their expression to power ten pool borders.

And ten lawnmowers.

Those activities are Pool Border Problem and Lawnmower Math. In Picture Perfect, for another example of this principle, we give students the option of either a) filling in a table with 24 rows, or b) writing an algebraic expression once.

In each case, students are more likely to see algebra as power than punishment.

The Desmos quarter just ended and this was a huge one for the team of teachers I support.

First, we made substantial upgrades to our entire activity pool. Second, we released ten new activities in the same amount of time it took us to release one activity two years ago. This is all due to major improvements to our technology and our pedagogy.

Technologically, our engineers created a powerful scripting language that hums beneath our activities, enabling us to set up more meaningful interactions between teachers, students, and mathematics.

Pedagogically, my teaching team has spent the last year refining our digital mathematics pedagogy through daily conversations, lesson pitches, lesson critiques, summary blog posts, occasional lunch chats with guests like the Khan Academy research team, and frequent consultation with our Desmos Fellows.

The result: we cut an activity pool that once comprised 300 pretty good activities down to 127 great ones, and we gave each one of those 127 a serious upgrade, making sure they took advantage of our best technology and pedagogy. Then we added ten more.

I don’t think I’ve learned as much or worked as hard in a three-month span since grad school, and I owe a debt of gratitude to my team — Shelley Carranza, Christopher Danielson, and Michael Fenton — for committing the same energy. Also, it goes without saying that none of our activity ideas would have been possible without support from our engineers and designers.

In future posts, I’ll excerpt those lessons to illustrate our digital pedagogy. For today, I’ll just introduce the activities themselves.

Picture Perfect

Hang loads of pictures precisely and quickly using arithmetic sequences.

Game, Set, Flat

Your shipment of tennis balls has been contaminated. Use exponential functions to find the bad ones.

Graphing Stories

Graphing Stories comes to Desmos just in time for its tenth birthday.

Pool Border Problem

One of the oldest and best problems for exploring algebraic equivalence. We wouldn’t have touched it if we didn’t think we had something to add.

Laser Challenge

Use your intuition for angle measure to bounce lasers off mirrors and through targets.

Lawnmower Math

Use Algebra and the properties of circles to help you mow ten lawns automatically and quickly.

Land the Plane

Use linear equations to land airplanes safely and precisely.

Circle Patterns

Practice circle equations by completing artistic patterns.

Constructing Polynomials

Develop your understanding of the behavior of polynomial graphs by creating them piece by piece, factor by factor.

What’s My Transformation?

This is my favorite introduction to the concept of a transformation. “Actually, there’s really only one parabola in the world — we just move it around to make new ones.”

We are still testing these activities. They are complete, but not complete complete, if you know what I mean. You won’t find all of them in our search index yet. We welcome your feedback.