I finally had a chance to do the Function Carnival with my classes.  Thank you to Desmos, Christopher Danielson, and Dan Meyer for their work on this project.

As David Cox captured in his blog previously, the real power of this activity is the immediate feedback.

When the graph looks like the one below and 8+ rocket men burst out of the cannon, the students see that right away and adjust for it.

Dan had mentioned in a blog post a while back that “this stuff is really difficult to do well.”  After seeing students work through this activity today, I can appreciate the difficulty in creating an online math activity that gives both students and teachers detailed feedback in real time.

Some observations:

• Students don’t realize at first that you can see their work live.  I allowed them to “play” for a minute, but some may need more encouragement.
• A tool to allow you to communicate digitally with the class would be nice.  Google chat, for example?
• Some students don’t realize that the bumper car SHOULD crash and make their graph to avoid it.
• A student or two misunderstood the graph misconception questions and went back and changed their graphs to look like the misconception graphs.
• It was interesting to see which students wanted their graphs to be perfect versus which ones said there’s was “good enough.”  It would be interesting to have a discussion about which is appropriate in the particular situation.

Bravo, Dan, Christopher and the Desmosians.  Thank you for creating an online math activity that gives me some faith in online math activities for the future.