At Desmos Classroom, we strive to build a more socially engaging classroom and believe Challenge Creators can help accomplish that goal, giving students the opportunity to create a “challenge” screen that their peers can interact with. With the public release of Challenge Creator authoring, we’d like to share our guiding principles and tips for authoring this unique set of screens.
What makes a good challenge creator?
High challenge variance. Give students the opportunity to create a challenge that is unique from others. Challenges should be encouraged to vary both in appearance and difficulty.
High response variance. Students should be allowed different ways to complete the challenge. The best challenges reveal a gallery with a wide range of responses that a student can compare and contrast with their own.
The tale of two challenge creators
Challenge Creator 1: In Fit Fights, students create a unique and challenging scatter plot of their choice.
Then students create what they interpret as the line of best fit, and we give good, interpretive feedback.
Once they submit their responses, students are encouraged to compare their results with other students. Here, there is both a high challenge variance and a high response variance.
Challenge Creator 2: In Calculating Slope, students create a line, but their choice is significantly restricted. Every line passes through the origin and the coordinates snap to integers.
Then students enter the slope of the line before submitting their challenge.
Here we not only include unnecessary restrictions on the challenge, but also do not encourage any response variation. In the end, only the correct numeric value matters. Calculating Slope does not make the cut of what we consider a good challenge creator.
Before you go on thinking that a complex challenge creator is the only way to create a good one, check this out.
How to build a Challenge Creator
Step 1: Add the Challenge Creator component to the screen. Add screens in the challenge creator left sidebar where students will make their challenge. If you have more than one screen, connect them using Computation Layer (CL) as needed so that all of the screens are dedicated to creating the challenge.
Step 2: Add the screen where the students will solve the challenge. Connect this screen to the screen(s) where students make the challenge using CL.
Tip: Before moving on, make sure your CL connections are all in place by previewing the activity.
Step 3: Create the challenge and response thumbnails.
Students see the challenge thumbnail in the class gallery. These thumbnails should provide a brief overview of the challenge setup.
Students see the response thumbnail after completing another student’s challenge. These thumbnails should provide a snapshot or description of the solution a student used to solve the challenge is appropriate here so students can compare their responses with others.
You can select the component you wish to use for both the challenge and response thumbnails from the drop down menu.
If you wish to customize them further, you can do so using any combination of text, sketch, and graph layers in the challenge creator CL.
Step 4 (optional): You can block challenge creation and submission using CL to prevent students from submitting an incomplete challenge or response. Similar to error messages, provide a condition and a message for the various reasons the challenge may be blocked. Otherwise, leave an empty string and the student will be allowed to move on.
The preventChallengeCreationReason sink locks students in the creation phase (everything except the final screen of the challenge creator).
The preventSubmissionReason sink locks students in the challenge phase (final screen of the challenge creator).
#MatchMyCL
Challenge Creators open up so many doors to more social classrooms. Better yet, they can be made relatively quickly and without too much CL! Here's an art gallery challenge that uses only one line of CL code in the entire activity:
