Checking in on #1TMCThing

I saw a tweet the other day that reminded me that the time has come.

To be honest, I had to go back to my TMC post to remember what my thing even was. I knew that there were two. It turns out that I've sort of been doing both!

The first was more engagement with the MTBoS community as a whole. In general, I have blogged more this year than ever before. I have been more active on Twitter than simply liking or retweeting. And, I spent time at the MTBoS booth at NCTM regional in Orlando (which was actually one of the highlights of the conference for me).

The second was about Desmos Activity Builder. Specifically, I wanted to create my own activities. I have yet to create an entire activity because I'm completely overwhelmed by having four preps. We've done a ton of Desmos activities this year, and I'm feeling more comfortable using the dashboard and teacher pacing.

Last week I assigned my calculus students a project where they would be using tangent lines to "pop the pigs" in Angry Birds. It's basically the same activity that my colleague assigned a year ago. As my students started working though, I thought about how great it would be via Desmos. That made me open Activity Builder and start messing around. I can't use it this year, but it might be helpful in the future - plus it's a good place for practice.

Then yesterday when I started thinking about my 1TMCThing. And I realized that a lot of the things I wanted to do in my activity are part of computation layer. I received access during the Desmos day at TMC this summer but hadn't had a chance to really do anything with it. I knew during that time that I didn't really know what any of it meant, and I hadn't had time to really investigate. Now I really don't have time to be learning computation layer, but I got so into it that I ended up spending hours just trying to figure out how it all works. I was fascinated. I made zero progress with my activity, but I feel like I learned a lot just about building and structuring activities.

So I'm halfway there.