Hi {{custom.firstName}}, I love this little experimenter thingy we built for you and your students, and I hope it generates some wonderful ideas today, ideas you can help students celebrate and develop.

An interactive screen where students enter a number and see if it's a factor of the width and height of a rectangle.

All of us are smarter than one of us.

 

Before students move to the next screens, I hope you'll pause and ask students to share some of their thoughts. If you ask students, "What's a new idea you've had since you started this task?", – students might:

 

  • Share a common factor they found. Perhaps you want to make a list of those and ask towards the end, "How can we be sure there aren't more?"
  • Share their strategies for finding common factors and for avoiding numbers that are factors of only one of the numbers.

 

All of those ideas are likely to set you up very nicely to help students learn what the greatest common factor is on the next screen. But I hope they'll also learn an important truth: in mathematics, all of us are smarter than any one of us.

 

Dan & the Desmos Classroom Team

PS. Please give us feedback on the last lesson.

Use the feedback form or just click your answer below then click "Submit" on the form!

 

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