I just made my first Marbleslides in Desmos! It was incredibly easy, and the students said it was a really fun way to learn.
This Marbleslides activity introduces students to transformation form and lets them practice moving graphs around with Marbleslides (SUCCESS!!) using the new parent graphs they just learned. My students know transformation form with linears, y = a(x – h) + k, but have not moved any other graphs around yet. (For this activity I used the absolute value, quadratic, square root, and cube root functions.)
I have two goals with Desmos this year.
- Shorten my Desmos Activity Builders, so that I have time in class to practice with the students outside of Desmos.
- Make worksheets to accompany my Desmos Activity Builders, so the students can have notes to look back on.
I felt this activity accomplished both, and my students really seemed to enjoy it. I have provided the activity and the worksheet for you to try. I would love feedback!
Desmos Introduction to Transformations Marbleslides
I Speak Math 
Julie – this is AWESOME! I absolutely love this! Thanks for sharing it – I am looking forward to using it with my Algebra 2s later this year.
–Lisa
Thanks girl! Let me know if I can make it better!
This was so much fun! My son and I will be playing all day today!
Nice job! I’m sure your students loved this. The only one I didn’t like was the really steep quadratic. I think I used 6x^2. Also, and I really like the MarbleSlides, I find students just doing trial and error each time and not thinking about it. It’s so easy to do trial and error, what’s the point of memorizing it. What if you included a pic(screenshot) of a MarbleSlide every few slides and have the students predict the change in the equation without being able to test it out? They could also explain their thinking. You could do multiple choice and give them a few options. When they chose a multiple choice, they have to explain why they picked that one. The teacher dashboard shows the results nicely too. Oh, and I get uncomfortable when someone calls the numbers from 0-1 fractions… sorry. Maybe it’s just me. I really did like your Activity Builder. I would totally use it in my class.
Hi Julie and Kaleb, I am currently working through the secondary education program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and we have also done a lot of work creating various lessons around the use of Desmos as well. One thing that I have found to be one of the best things about Desmos is how well it is designed for students to make explorations and conjectures regarding transformations of functions in the coordinate plan. When I was supposed to create a Desmos activity for a hypothetical lesson that I would have given, I decided to frame it by telling students that they were chosen to design new rollercoasters based off of the form of linear, quadratic, absolute value, square root, cube root, and sine functions. One of the difficult things that I found when I was making this activity was how I could possibly make a connection to some kind of real-world application. So any advice would be appreciated!
What a cool way to bring fun to such a “boring” subject (according to my kids). I’m definitely going to try this with my students and see how it goes. I’m always looking for ways to make it fun and to keep them from dozing off in my class. Thanks for sharing.
Pingback: Using Cool Fonts in Google Classroom and Desmos | La Vie Mathématique