Triangle Centers Algebraically: Completely Student-Paced Using #Desmos AB

Desmos Activities have completely transformed my classroom. Luckily, my school is “bring your own device” so my students have their computers every day in class..

I introduced triangle centers and how they are created geometrically (day 1) and explored vocabulary with my students as much as possible. After students learned what the centroid, orthocenter, and circumcenter were, I wanted to teach them how to find them algebraically (we talked about incenter, but not in an algebraic way) screen-shot-2016-12-13-at-2-49-46-pm

Below are the activities. We did one activity per day. While students were working, I walked around and answered questions all class. Desmos Activity builder really helped differentiate this unit. It also really helped students who were missing school. It was really easy to keep them up to date with what we were doing in class!

 

 

The activities below included all three. They became a little less scaffolded each time.

If a student did not finish an activity during class, the activity became homework. For the first three, every student finished in a 55-minute class. The activities with all three took students a little longer to complete.

I gave my assessment for this unit on Desmos AB and had students find the “best location for a water station” between three different fields on our campus. At the end of the assessment, I asked students how they felt they did and if they thought Desmos was helpful to them. Below are a few responses I received.

 

screen-shot-2016-12-13-at-2-47-08-pm

Leave a comment