@scott: Thanks for your comments, and the kind words. I’ll keep serving up what I’m working on, whether it goes well or not. 🙂 I appreciate you stopping by to share your thoughts.

Thanks again for sharing your thoughts about an AB that you have built and want to improve or start over from scratch.

I agree with Andrew and eraskin’s suggestions. I wonder if a key question to focus on for the activity is, “How does the scoring average success in college compare to the scoring average the first year for a WNBA top pick?” Consider having the red point on the line x=19.4 to manipulate the prediction without the rest of the data. The next slide would include the data along with the prediction and the line y=x. I would pivot the best fit line that Andrew mentioned around the mean college and mean 1st year scoring. The significance of this point is often overlooked.

Keep up the good work, Michael. I appreciate your focus on always wanting to make a better learning experience for students.

P.S. I clicked through to see your blog… and was a little bummed to see so few posts. I’ve subscribed anyway, in the hope that you’ll share more of your thoughtful, insightful reflections there in the weeks and months ahead. Cheers!

I’ll start off with admitting that I know little to nothing about sports and tend to steer clear of this topic for classroom activities…this is something I need to work on as I know many students are very into sports. But that’s probably why I never used this activity.

This has an obvious 3-Act feel to it. I think the information in the beginning is important to setting the story and (now that I’m taking the time to read it) kinda makes me want to know the answer. I think that the video and discussion about what math students see is an integral part to wanting to keep going. I’m not sure how that would integrate into an activity builder, but it seems like it would be easier now that we can control the pacing. This is kind of what I’m picturing:
1. Show a video (if one exists)
2. In desmos students type in what “mathy” questions the video poses.
3. Have the teacher screen up so we can see the questions. (If you’re brave enough! Otherwise, read some aloud.)
4. Reveal the question we’re working on
5. You could even have slides asking for input about what info they would need, etc…
All of this can be done outside of activity builder as well if the activity is getting to be too much “input” and not enough “let’s just do the math”…but the ideas can be presented in the Teacher Tips section

On screen 5 can you use Desmos Magic to plot the point for the student? “The red plot was your prediction, use the purple dot make a new prediction.”

I think like the idea of skipping from screen 5 to 8 and having them create the line of best fit using sliders (like you suggesed in step 9.) This gives them ownership of their answer. Although, I wonder if it’s then important to eventually show them what the actual line of best fit is…I feel like this is important, but don’t want to make them feel like we’re saying “hey…you were wrong…here’s what you should have done…”

For screen 10, I recently did a “Think, Pair, Share” setup in desmos. They submitted an answer themselves, then the next screen said something like, “Discuss your answer with your group, combine your best thoughts into 1 coherent group answer.” Then we looked at answers that were submitted as a class. Again, I can see this being too much “input”, but thought I’d throw it out there.

And as for screen 11…no comment…as I have absolutely no clue what’s going on there! 🙂

Also, since we made predictions at the start, I feel like I’d like to go back and compare my original prediction to what we determined? Is there any sort of reveal to this?

Not sure if any of this would make the activity more usable…plus I’m not sure how much of it is possible and fits with the activity builder feel. Good luck and thanks for allowing us to grapple through this with you!

Thanks for being vulnerable and sharing your thoughts and critique of your own activities. I think it’s a great practice we all can do with the activities we create. Your activities are always so clean, creative, and full of rich math.

As for your WNBA activity, I agree that using the first three screens to deliver [important] information might be a lot for students. Especially English language learners. What do you think about deleting screens 1-2 and starting the activity straight away at screen 3? Maybe just add the year(s) for the fact and simply the question.

For screens 4-7, I’d propose just having one screen (maybe two) and have the graph y=x on their with a draggable point on the red line so students can change its slope in order to best fit the data. Then move on with the math and the conversations from there. I think you could accomplish the same, maybe more, with about 6-8 screens.

Thanks again for sharing and being vulnerable here. I look forward to more thoughtful reflections and feel free to toss one of mine up there so the #mtbos can critique it.