GeoGebra applets
We have continued to add and update GeoGebra applets across the site. A recent (off-curriculum) addition is this inner solar system applet:
This applet shows the Sun, the inner three planets, and the earth’s moon, and how they move in relation to each other. You can choose any of these five bodies to appear as a fixed centre to see how the others move in relation to the chosen body, and you can optionally trace out the paths of any of the bodies.
For something particularly mesmeric, try choosing Mercury or Venus as the centre, show the trace of the earth’s moon, and let it play for at least a few minutes!
Desmos classroom activities
We have added some more algebra and geometry Desmos classroom activities to our resources. These activities contain randomised questions which means that for any given tasks, students in general will get similar, but not identical, questions to each other. As a teacher, you can quickly see the type of questions that students are seeing, but you can also dig deeper to see the specific question that each student sees. The video below shows the mobile phone screen of a student working through a task (on the right) and the teacher’s dashboard view (on the left). Whilst teachers can monitor students’ progress on a question-by-question basis during a live lesson, you don’t have to do this in real time. You can simply check how students fared at a later time, if you wish. This makes these activities suitable for use as homework tasks.
Where available, you will find links to these Desmos classroom activities in the expandable Teacher resources boxes under a topic’s set of slides.
Target X
We have added several more Target X sheets, containing questions from a mix of topics, are designed to be used with students targeting GCSE grades between 4 and 9. Target 4, Target 5, and Target 6 sheets contain four questions, whilst Target 7, Target 8, and Target 9 sheets each contain two longer questions. The sheets are designed to take students around 10 minutes. Each sheet is available in three “fixed” versions A, B, and C; these are PDFs containing fixed questions. Additionally, each sheet is also available as a “dynamic” version, which you can use to generate and unlimited number of questions similar to those in the fixed sheets. This video shows dynamically regenerating version of Target 8 Sheet 03:
Delta exercises
We have continued to add Delta exercises to a few topics, to follow on from the Alpha, Beta and Gamma exercises. Here is an exercise from A17b Part 2, involving substitution and solving. It involves a little bit of “thinking backwards” as the \(x\) value that satisfies the equations has been given, and students instead need to solve for the missing numbers denoted by the grey boxes.
