Good practice though

I messaged Jay over at Desmos a month or so ago and asked if they could make a Derivative Buffet, similar to their Antiderivative Buffet activity.

Being the very best there is in customer service, Desmos of course had this activity created for me within hours.

The idea is that kids create their own function and find its derivative. This function then goes into a class gallery. Students then work each other’s in the gallery. Jay did an amazing job giving both graphical and written feedback. Here’s a video of what it looks like:

If you know me, you know how much I love having kids create their own problems. Answering questions on that kind of task is a formative assessment completely in its own category.

My thinking with this activity was to make it their virtual day assignment (Wednesday). I did have the foresight to have them create their own function in class. I did not have the foresight to know what a task that would be (like I said—a category of its own).

Being the fun sucker that I am, I naturally put some restrictions on their functions which they were less than thrilled about. (“Guys! Make your functions easy since we have to work each other’s!” “We literally can’t!!” Peterson snickers in the background.)

Before they submit their own problem, they have to be able to work their own problem. The activity will not move on until they can solve their own.

Enter more evil laughter.

Every hour struggled with it. The whole day I thought, “Well, this is really good practice for them. They hate it now but it’s going to pay in the long run.”

And then my last class must have been in my head because I kept hearing sighs followed by, “It’s good practice though!”

It is, indeed.