One of my favourite maths websites I love to use in my teaching is Desmos.com.

Desmos is a FREE online graphing calculator as well as set classroom activities using the graphing capabilities.

Their about page shows their passion for mathematics:

Desmos wants to help every student learn math and love learning math. But “every student” is a lot of students so we create digital math tools and let the Internet take them to anyone who wants them.

One of the most useful sections of the website is the classroom activities. There are may preprepared activities you can use with your class on any graphing topic you can think of!

Use the search menu on the left to search for an activity or the menu below to see the most popular activities or ‘Bundles’ of activities for each function. I recommend you click ‘create account’ so students can log onto your class and you can save their progress.

My 4 favourite activities (available for each function type) are:

Marbleslides

Polygraph

Function Carnival

Water lines

Check out my other blog posts for a description of each activity!

When you choose an activity to use with your class, you ask students to log onto student.desmos.com. They will be prompted to enter your classcode, which you can find on your screen.

Once their enter the class code all their responses can be seen by you on your teacher screen and are saved for viewing later. They will be prompted to enter a name and I always remind them to add a name they can be distinguished by in my class, otherwise I can’t tell if they have done anything or not!

Playing these games, which are sometimes interactive, sometimes independent and sometimes collaborative, they seem to get the perfect mix for each activity so students are learning and playing equally.

I have never heard so many “Yes!” and “I got it!” cheers from my class and seen the whole class engaged in trying to solve a problem at the same time. These activities are a hit in my class and I look forward to introducing them to each new class I have at the start of every year.

If you want to find out more about Desmos check out their Quick start guide.

I’d love to hear how you use Desmos in your class, leave a comment below!