Although I am an active user and creator of Desmos Activity builder, this week was my first time ever using  Desmos Polygraphs. Oh my Gosh, let me tell you… this activity was so much fun!!  Remarks that I received from my students were….

“Can we play this all class?”     “Let’s keep playing through break!”

“This is helping so much!” 

Polygraph takes after the board game  Guess Who?! When students sign into the polygraph they are partnered with another student in the class. One student is the picker and the other is the guesser. The picture chooses an object and the guesser has to ask yes/no questions to try and figure out the object. When one pair finishes a game then they become paired with another student. SO MUCH FUN.

This week I played Polygraph in both my geometry and algebra 1 class.

Geometry

I first decided to try Polygraph after reading the Geometry Teacher Blog created by Andrew Shauver. His site has a TON of great resources for geometry. I was starting Polygons this week and I saw that he posted two links. One for  Desmos Polygraph Basic Quadrilaterals and the other for Desmos Polygraph Advanced Quadrilaterals .

I love Desmos, but I never used Polygraph. I wanted to try it out and understand it, so I actually signed in as two different people and played myself!! 😝 It was so much fun!

I introduced these polygraphs to my class after we discovered the different types of special quadrilaterals. I wanted them to practice their vocab by asking yes/no questions to figure out which quadrilateral their partner chose. My students loved it! They said it really helped them define the different types of quadrilaterals. It was a great way to learn special quadrilaterals instead of memorizing their differences.

Algebra 1

I used Polygraph to introduce scatter plots to my algebra 1 class. Before I explained scatter plots and correlations I had my students sign in and play each other. They were describing the scatter plots using vocab that I didn’t teach them yet!! It was funny because I had one student ask “What does this have to do with math?!!” I kept telling him to trust me and it would all fit together.  I let them play for about 15 minutes before pulling my class back together. I showed a positive correlation scatter plot and asked my students to describe what they saw. I then had a student come up to the board and draw a line through the data that they thought would best describe it. This is when my students made the connection with a postive correlation and positive slope. YAY slope. We then did the same thing with negative and no correlations. We also looked at strong, moderate and weak correlations.

Next I had students go back to Polygraph to play again. This time, they had to use the vocabulary we discussed to describe and eliminate each scatter plot. It was great to see how their use of vocabulary improved the move games they played.

If you haven’t played Polygraph yet I definitely recommend it. There are a ton in Desmos, but you can also create your own! Don’t be like me and wait so long to try it!!!