Tuesday, August 9, 2016

Desmos card sort and ordering rational numbers

So, I am continuing to be fascinated with the Desmos activity builder, and I am playing around more and more with the card sort feature. (See my initial blog entry on the card sort for an introduction to the feature.) I realized last night that I could do some simple rational number ordering with the card sort and throw in a different way for the students to think about the numbers.

Here's a screenshot of my activity:

And in case it's hard to see, here's a blowup of that number line. (Note that students can get a bigger view themselves by tapping on the graph in the activity.)
The idea is that students take the three numbers and match them up with the cards for "Lowest number", "Middle number", and "Highest number". That's fine and interactive, but what I love, love, love is using a number line to represent one of the numbers. I not only hit visual learning styles, but I get the students to think about where the other numbers would go on that image.

The only issue I see is the labels --- this works fine for three numbers (and I have a challenge screen with five numbers), but I don't want the students to get lost with the labels if I had four or seven numbers. As far as I can tell, Desmos does not distinguish between the order of card in a card sort (which would make this a bit easier). But this is a great way to emphasize different ways of viewing rational numbers.

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