Desmos Factor Sort

I went out to dinner on Friday night to see Hidden Figures with Sandra Ollerhead @sollerhead1, Heather Kohn @heather_kohn, and Brian Abend and @MrAbend and we were discussing factoring, because what else do we talk about on a Friday night at dinner?

Sandy said that she doesn't teach factoring.  She has the kids figure it using a card sort, so we asked her to share it on Twitter.  I am teaching it right now, so I grabbed it.  It is 5 different card sorts, scaffolded in difficulty, trying to allow the students to see a pattern.  It looked great, however, I could see it was going to require a lot of cutting.  I have 2 classes.  The kids would work in pairs, so for one sort, I would need 24 pieces of paper, cut all up and paperclipped together and then there are 5 of them, yikes, nope.

With my student teacher, we decided to make a card sort in Desmos.  You do have to go into a little wrench thing on the page and turn on the ability to make a card sort or a marbleslide.  From here, we created one lesson with 5 slides, 1 card sort per slide.  You can type in the math equation.  And, we made the answer key.  It didn't take too long to make it.

I tried it out in Period 1.  One thing I would suggest to @Desmos is to make the card sort change color to maybe green when it is sorted correctly.  Currently, I have to project my teacher dashboard to show the kids the red/green to see if they are correct or not.

Card sort 1 went well, 2 good, 3 good, 4 - all red, uh oh.  I took the blame.  I said maybe I made the answer key wrong.  I looked at their work and it was correct.  Same thing with sort 5, something was up.

Turns out I did have one quadratic in the mix that wasn't factorable, so we got rid of that one, but we figured out it was because within one sort, I had the same factor, like two (x+3)s.  I may have physically sorted one of them and the student sorted the other so it didn't see it as correct.

Luckily I had a prep before my next Alg 1 class, so we had time to edit.  It now works perfectly.

Give  it a try if you like:  Desmos Factoring A is not 1 Card Sort