Two Lane Road and Collaborative Data Collection

I love doing three act problems. This fact should surprise nobody that regularly reads my blog.

In tasks that involve prediction or measurement from a range of sources, I see lots of tables of values made by students that stay in the notebook. I have always wanted to get that data in the hands of the rest of the students to use, or not use, as they see fit. In one of my previous iterations, I pasted the data into a shared Google spreadsheet that students could then paste into a Desmos graph, again, if they felt doing so would be helpful. This was incredibly rich source of material for conversations between students. Still, that extra step of having to paste from one collaborative document (Google) to a non-collaborative one (Desmos Calculator) was one more step than I felt was needed.

Of course, you’re now screaming at the screen. “Calling out Desmos for being non-collaborative is entirely off base, Evan” , you say. I agree to an extent. Their own activities share data collected by individual students, and on the teacher side, the Activity Builder does the same thing for letting teachers see student data all in one place. They do this incredibly well. Students also get to see each others answers when teachers let them. What doesn’t happen right now is students seeing each other’s graphs, tables, and lists of expressions.

This, along with a desire to play with the Desmos API, is why I created DataTogether (Github repository here), a hacky way to make Desmos data collaborative. The page is written in React, and uses Firebase to do the realtime data connection.

Dan Meyer tweeted shortly after that these changes might be somewhere in the pipeline already:

@emwdx On the one hand, I admire your industry. On the other, I'm mad that we make this so difficult. Promise to make this unnecessary soon.

— Dan Meyer (@ddmeyer) November 1, 2016

This is probably why I may not be adding a lot of code comments to my code in the near future.

I did my Two Lane Road 3-act with a small group of students this morning on account of tenth graders being out for the PSAT. After the standard Act 1 conversation, and a really great conversation about agreements between groups on collecting data from the video, the students began collecting data on the red and blue cars.

The students were efficiently able to collect data together on separate computers after profuse apologies for the limitations of my code:

I then had each student use the tools within Desmos to construct a linear model from the data. The fact that two computers were looking at the same data, but in different Desmos windows, paid significant dividends when two students on the same team created their models in different ways. One student made a regression. Another created a line that went through one set of points perfectly, but missed another. Math class conversation gold right there.

I exported both of their data through the console (code shown below) and pasted it into Desmos. I then put together a simulation of the red and blue car so that the teams could see what their car looked like in simulation.

You can check out the Desmos graph here.

This allowed us to make a prediction directly off of their models that looked like the original video.

We ran out of time in the end to do much more than sharing predictions and watching the third act, but I’m pretty pleased with how things went overall. My paper handouts with three printed color frames of the video went unused. I think

A big shout-out of thanks to everyone for helping test the data collection tool I shared earlier.

Here’s a screenshot of our age vs. teaching years data:

The data can be downloaded from the DataTogether page, loading data set 3DR9, and then by going to the console and entering the code below:

ptString = "";
myComponent.state.groupData.forEach(function(pt){ptString=ptString+pt.x+" \t "+pt.y+" \n "});

This string can then be pasted right into the Desmos expression list if you want to play with it.