If you’ve been keeping up with Desmos news, some really big items hit the (digital) shelves this past year, including huge updates to the feedback tool, component level correctness, actions in graphs, and a brand new CL Documentation. You can catch up here if you missed the announcements.
For this first issue of 2022 and the first issue in our third year of this publication, we thought we’d share a few small updates that you may have missed and some really cool things you can do with them.
Cursor Tracking in Graphs
currentX and currentY have been in place in sketches for a few years now, and they help us make the backgrounds of our sketch components more dynamic. Good news: these sources are now available in graphs! While this may seem like a small change (they do essentially the same thing in graphs and graph backgrounds), combining them with actions makes for a lot of fun!
For example, you can use the current cursor location to add “stickers” to your graph by centering a clickable image on the cursor and using actions to add its coordinates to a list!
Note: This particular use might not play well with touch screens, so make sure you know what devices the activity will be run on and/or provide alternatives.
Thankfully there’s a solution! scaleThicknessBy allows you to scale the thickness dynamically so sketches scale proportionally when you change the window bounds. You can apply it to any sketch layer. Check it out!
Did you know you can manually set the button style in a multiple choice component? You can also set the number of buttons you want by selecting “basic buttons” and using maxButtonsPerRow.
Keep your screens neat and tidy (like they’re designed to do), or creatively lay out button arrays.
Resetting a multiple choice back to its original state was a highly requested and useful upgrade, but the appetite for this sink came out of a need for cleanliness in an activity (e.g., resetting the choice between student attempts or problems) and not something you would categorize as “fun.”
But have you tried it with actions? So. Much. Fun. Use it with maxButtonsPerRow and you can turn your multiple choice component into a grid of buttons!
Need more reset? Try resetOnChange in action buttons, math inputs, sketches, and tables!
We’re excited to enter our third year of this publication and hope you’ll continue to find it informative. As always, if you have anything you’d like to comment on or anything you’d like to see us cover in a future newsletter, feel free to send us your comments/suggestions.
#MatchMyCL
In a recent team meeting, we carved out some time to play with these features and we had a blast! We thought you might too, so for this month’s challenge, utilize one of these features in an interaction or describe how you might use it in an activity. Share your thoughts or examples with us on Twitter or in our Facebook group using #matchMyCL.
This Month's Challenge:
Utilize one of these features in an interaction
or describe how you might use it in an activity.
Want to see what we had fun toying with? We collected a few finished and unfinished interactions here.
