If you work at a high school, you probably don’t need a reminder that it’s Friday the 13th, and it’s the day before Valentine’s day.  When it comes to adolescents, the mood is a mixture of giddiness and angst.  A student asked his girlfriend to prom by filling her locker with ping-pong balls.  No doubt every student in my 3rd hour was able to snag one of those little white balls of sound-joy and test their durability all over my classroom.  Good times.

Regardless, I was determined to make an attempt at engaging them mathematically.  Enter Sandman (oops.  DES-man).  I had read on twitter about teachers using this activity as a platform for having students share graphs.

I posted a Daily Desmos graph on the projector and then watched them attempt to create it using the Des-man Dashboard on my tablet.  It was delightfully challenging for them to get the graph through the correct points and restrict the domain perfectly.

Because this was our first time formally restricting domains and ranges for piece-wise functions, I kept to the basic challenges.  Here’s one that stumped a few of them:

(Thank you @marybourassa)

Here was their attempt:

I’m pretty sure I got so excited about the possibilities in my other classes that I took my tablet and raced down the hall to share the awesomesauce with my colleagues.  Not sure they were as geeked out as I was but they humored me regardless.