MPM1D1-Day 27 Desmos Linear Activities

The goal for today was to talk about slope. We started with the Polygraph: Lines activity from Desmos. The idea is that they get paired up with another student in the class. One of them chooses a line from a list, the other asks questions that can be answered with a yes or no to help pick which graph their partner chose. It's basically Guess Who with lines. I wanted to start with this to see if students would use some of the vocabulary we've talked about.

They started right away and got right into it. I saw the use of lots of terminology but not much about what we've talked about. I heard comments about corners rather than quadrants. I heard some reference to the origin. And more than once I saw "Is your line straight?". This one drove me crazy! When I asked "Isn't every line straight?" these students would reply with something along the lines of "Yes, but I mean like this", indicating that they were talking about a vertical or horizontal line. We'll keep plugging away at the terminology.

  I let them play a round or two then brought them back together as a class. I asked which types of questions they found helpful. I then reminded them of some terminology (slope (positive and negative), quadrants) then introduced some new terms for some (x and y-intercepts). They played again and their questions were much better. There were a couple of math fights about wrong answers to questions such as "You said it had a negative slope. That slope is positive."

Once we'd had a bit of experience with the activity we moved onto Polygraph: Lines Part 2. They worked through the activity, hopefully improving their vocabulary and understanding of lines. Some students we motoring through the work, others needed a little encouragaement.

The last activity for the day was Put the Point on the Line, where students have to determine where a third point needs to go in order to be on a line with the other two. The best part about these activities is the teacher dashboard that allows me to see all the work my students have done, even after the fact. I can look the work over and see where the gaps are and then look at providing some assistance in those areas and I have a record that will allow me to see a student's growth over time.

There are lots of other Desmos activities involving linear relations here.

Once they were done the activities we talked about finding the slope between two point on a graph. We've done this before but this was a good reminder. Then we moved into finding the slope without a graph. I gave them this handout to practice with.