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Using teacher.desmos to help mathematics students write papers

Julie Barnes ⟨jbarnes@wcu.edu⟩

Abstract:

While teaching our capstone class in Fall 2024, I realized on an early assignment that many of my students were so used to writing proofs that they assumed writing a math paper meant pasting a bunch of proofs together with little to no exposition between proofs. To help them bridge the gap between proving a homework problem and writing a paper, I developed an activity in teacher.desmos that broke down portions of the writing process into smaller steps. Students responded real-time in class to various prompts and could see each others’ responses anonymously. This generated a class discussion about how best to connect ideas in their papers. The activity generated positive feedback both in the moment and on end of course evaluations. In this talk, I will explain how to use the free resource teacher.desmos to do an activity like this, show details on how I organized it, share samples of what the students wrote, and quote some comments from evaluations. If possible, we will end the talk with a short audience participation demonstration of how it works.

Scheduled for: 2025-03-01 10:20 AM: Contributed Paper Session II-8 #2 in Phillips 217

Status: Accepted

Collection: Contributed Papers

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