Holiday Travel and Exporting PearDeck Data to Desmos
One of the unique phenomena of international schools is the reality that, during a vacation, the school population disperses to locations across the world. I had students do an end of semester reflection through PearDeck, and one of the slides asked students to drag a dot to where they were going to spend the vacation.
PearDeck allowed me to see the individual classes and share these with the students one at a time. I wanted to create a composite of all of the classes together in Desmos to share upon our return to classes, which happens tomorrow. You can find the result of this effort below. This is the combined data for draggable slides from five different sessions of the same deck.
The process of creating this image was a bit of work to figure out, but in the end wasn’t too hard to pull off. Here’s how I did it.
The export function of a completed PearDeck session, among other things, gives the coordinates of each student’s dragged dot in a Draggable slide. I could not use these coordinates as is, as graphing them on top of the map image in Desmos did not actually yield the correct locations. I guessed that these coordinates represented a percentage of the width of the image used for the Draggable background since the images people upload are likely all of different sizes. I did a brief search in the documentation, and couldn’t find official confirmation, but I’m fairly sure this is the case. An additional complication for using these is that the origin is at the upper left hand corner, which is typical for programming pixel art, but not correct for use with a Cartesian system as in Desmos.
This means that an exported data point located at 40, 70 is at 40% of the width of the image, and 70% of the height of the image, measured from the top left corner.
Luckily, Desmos makes it pretty easy to apply a transformation to the data to make it graph correctly. I took all of the data from the PearDeck export, pasted it into a spreadsheet class by class, and then pasted the aggregate data into a Desmos table. Desmos appears to have a 50 point limitation for pasting data this way, which is why the Desmos link below has two separate tables.
Click here to see the graph and data on Desmos
If there’s an easier way to do this, I’d love to hear your suggestions in the comments.
Any reason you wouldn’t create a movable point in Desmos on top of an image of the map?
The ability to export the responses from the deck was key to my plans – check out my post on Notes to the Future to see why. Desmos activity builder certainly could have handled this task otherwise.