Quin There Done That

During last week’s workshop, we took a leap and changed the format. In past weeks we had made groups based on grade, skill level, or random groups assigned to be the right size. Last week we didn’t assign groups at all. We opened breakout rooms with different activities, and let students move through them at whatever pace and in whatever order suited their pace.

The activity was another one with Desmos animation, but it was a bit more artistically oriented. We introduced The Quintessential Human Traveler, or Quin for short, who students could animate to move through space after designing their own faces in Desmos. We saw lots of creativity from our students in how they designed their Quins and the ways they chose to animate them.

We created four different breakout rooms, each with its own focus. We had two breakout rooms for designing faces; one of the rooms was to design the face quickly and move on, while the other was meant for a slower pace. The latter room was chosen by students who either wanted more time and support to build their faces, or who wanted to take the time to add lots of details to their faces. The other two rooms were focused on different ways to animate Quin, either to bounce along a parabolic path or to squish and bounce up and down.

With more flexibility, students created a wide range of animations and pictures with a simple group of shapes, functions, and transformations. Some students worked through one of the Quin building breakout rooms as well as both of the animations, while others stayed on one of the Quin breakout rooms for most of the session to customize their faces or make multiple of them. It gave the students the freedom to work at their own paces, and helped the RabbitMath team make sure that students were getting the support they needed.

We also started sending a survey link to our students at the end of the workshop to collect feedback on how they felt about it. This is a tool that we’re hoping to use more in the coming weeks, including by adding a section for students to share their creations with us if they want us to share them on our website. Hopefully we’ll be able to add a gallery of student work in the coming week.

Peter Taylor Quote of the Week: “You’ll try things and fail, and then get it right and figure it out.”