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Day 44: Scatter plotting in Desmos

I remembered last year's reflection on this lesson at 5am. I heaved a sigh, skipped a shower (tmi?), skipped making coffee and quickly made a few small improvements.

Normally, I ask aloud for students' shoe size and height in inches (I am still in search of reliable questions to ask students to illustrate direct and indirect variation; please share!). This year I made it a google form.


This didn't take long and was an easy way to add a bit of variety and 1:1-ness to my lesson. Around 5:30 am, I made a discovery that was a real lucky break:

You can paste a table into desmos and it will plot the points!

Amazing.

I am sure everyone else already knew that as I am famously late to knowing things, but this really made my day.

I was going for indirect variation by plotting extra curricular hours and hours of sleep. Students confessed to not sleeping because of other reasons... go figure. :)
The rest of my lesson was the same as before.


I have been trying out socrative in class. I need more practice. Last time, I couldn't figure out how to show a nice bar graph distribution of the responses in the moment. This time, I made it open ended and socrative told students their answers were wrong because their spacing didn't match mine. I wish it had a better way to type in math.


Nonetheless, my algebra classes began with a formative assessment on writing equations given a point and a line perpendicular to the goal line. The kids had a few questions on homework which their peers addressed for them at the document camera. They took the survey, loved chastising each other's responses and did a decent job talking about correlation of their responses. 

Our sample problem took a morbid turn once we used our best fit equation to determine when life expectancy would be 100...



Nice discussions followed after we used our equation and found that in 1800 life expectancy was only 20. 

"We only had numbers from 1900 on."

"There were a lot of advances in healthy and safety."

It is a shame that I only have time to devote 2 days to scatter plots. Tomorrow will be the spaghetti lab and then it's on to systems.

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