Learn how to create free, online interactive lessons of your own design to help students understand graphs and the STEM concepts represented in graphs. Bring a laptop.
Learn how to create free, online interactive lessons of your own design to help students understand graphs and the STEM concepts represented in graphs. SmartGraphs permits non-programmers to create new multi-page, interactive activities. Teachers and students may also freely use and share existing activities, which are released under a Creative Commons license (see http://www.concord.org/projects/smartgraphs#curriculum). SmartGraphs activities run in a Web browser; there is no software to download or install. This ease of use is important because it is often difficult for teachers and students to install software on school computers. Students interact with on-screen graphs to learn about linear equations (such as in Algebra I), the motion of objects (as in physical science), population dynamics (such as predator-prey graphs in biology), cooling curves (such as in chemistry), global warming, or other STEM topics that use scatter plots or line graphs. Once someone creates a SmartGraphs activity, the URL can be shared with students or with anyone else. Users may run the activity at no cost, and also can share it.
In addition to creating and testing activities for students, the presenters are developing an authoring tool so that non-programmers can create new activities. They demonstrate a beta version of the authoring tool and provide enough information so that participants can begin to use it, too. Bring your laptop if you have one with you—but if you don’t, you can follow the demo anyway.