Classroom Mashup 03: Quick Desmos Activities

First, I’m renaming my “Friday Mashup” series, because who wants to be limited to posting that only on Fridays? It’s a quick rundown of things I want to share that aren’t quite big enough for their own blog post. Here are previous ones:

01 | 02

Today’s is about two quick Desmos Activity Builders that I created, one for my Algebra 1 class and one for Algebra 2.

Polygraph: Polynomial Functions

If you haven’t used a Desmos Polygraph in your classroom yet, you’re missing out! It’s the most surefire way to force students to reckon with their vocabulary understanding. There’s no way for them to pretend here. If they don’t understand it, they have to ask for help or they literally cannot play the game. There exists a Polygraph for pretty much every type of function, but most of them are the graphs of those functions.

My Algebra 1 students are learning terminology for degrees of polynomials and the number of terms that it has, and in past years I have realized that this vocabulary does not stick at all. We finish a whole unit on solving quadratics and they don’t know what the word quadratic actually means! So I made a polygraph, but of polynomial EXPRESSIONS instead of graphs. In Desmos, you can insert a picture into their graphs, so I typed out the equations, screengrabbed them, and inserted them into graphs, turning the axes and gridlines off.

Here you can see an example game from two of my students.

(Sidenote: You can sign up for a free teacher account with Equatio and easily type mathematical notation or create graphs without having to open a Google Doc or Word Doc, for purposes of screengrabbing. I use it constantly to insert equations on things that don’t have a built in equation editor, or for things like this)

Matching Factored Form to Standard Form Polynomials

My Algebra 2 students are just starting to factor polynomial expressions, in preparation for solving polynomial equations. I have a traditional worksheet assignment for them on this topic, but I wanted a bit of practice first that was more guided. I thought initially of doing a question stack, but I didn’t want to do 10 questions and didn’t want to spend the time creating a new template for fewer questions. My next thought was matching, but I realized I didn’t really want to print that out on cards, and then my brain remembered that card sorts are an option on Desmos Activity Builder!

Each polynomial expression has a matching factored form card, which students can drag on top of each other to match together. The answer key is even set so that you can put the teacher screen on the board for students to check their work if you want! I then simply added a graph screen onto the activity, since my students are factoring using x-intercepts on a graph to get them started, so that they could do their graphing without leaving the activity or needing multiple tabs. If you don’t want this screen, you could make a copy of the activity and delete that screen!

I haven’t used this one with students yet, but I think it will be a good quick check of their understanding and a confidence builder before we do more open ended factoring work.

Let me know if you use either of these Desmos Activities, or if you have ideas to improve them (or if you improve them yourself!)

Color By Number: Multiplying Polynomials Resource

My Algebra 2 students are beginning their unit on solving polynomial equations, and as I was looking through my calendar from last year and my files, I realized that most of the practice for this unit ends up being just straight practice worksheets. Which is what they need, once they get to the whole process of solving an entire polynomial equation by factoring out rational roots and then solving the remaining quadratics – just a lot of examples. But not wanting them to have an entire unit with no “fun” activities, I went in search of something fun to start the unit with, when they briefly review how to multiply polynomials.

In my search, I could not seem to find anything that fit what I wanted. There are a LOT of resources for multiplying binomials by binomials, which is the Algebra 1 skill that is the precursor to this, but all I could find for multiplying higher degree polynomials together, or multiplying more than two polynomials together, was…worksheets.

I did find a few color by number activities for multiplying binomial by binomial and that made me wonder if customizable color by number activities existed. A quick TeachersPayTeachers search (on the FREE only setting, I never spend money on that site because I disagree with that practice, but that’s another story) found me this from Pink Cat Studio. I grabbed a worksheet from our Algebra 2 textbook (Holt, Rinehart, Winston Algebra 2 from 2003, we have not updated our textbook in awhile) and chose six problems off of it to match the six colors in the image. I mixed up the numbers so they didn’t go in order on the key, and the Pink Cat Studio site spit out an image file for me to save!

I then just typed the six problems I had picked, and made an answer bank so students could match the colors with the correct problem number!

As you can see, some of my students chose to utilize a distribution strategy, while others chose to utilize an area strategy.

If you want to use this resource, I have the Google Doc, which you can make a copy of to edit, or the PDF version.