Then I showed kids a google doc which had all the info for the contest - and the link to the google form to submit their entries. Some who were getting boring graphs saw the cool graphs their classmates were getting and were inspired to mix things up since they knew they could make neat things.
They gasped and turned their screens to show their friends. They got excited by what they were seeing. They dug into old functions they had learned about.
Then I gave everyone 7 minutes to just come up with something pretty. Then I might have altered the function a bit more, like and we saw what happened. So for example, if they said, I might have added the slider.
I then pulled up desmos and asked my kids to shout out some polar function. So after our unit on polar graphing, I took 10 minutes at the start of class to introduce this idea of a Polar. (Now to be fair, desmos isn’t great with creating great complicated polar graphs… and it’s better to write them parametrically to get a bit more accuracy… so this is a bit of a lie of a graph in that it isn’t totally accurate… but it’s oh so pretty.) Why? Because one day during the polar unit, I started playing around with desmos and accidentally created: This was something I wanted to do after introducing polar graphing. Then I printed them out on photopaper and hung them up. These are polar graphs that students designed using Desmos.
