Dan Meyer emphasizes that students should be abstracting in math class. When we present a formula and then talk about a situation in which it would be useful, we’ve done all the abstracting. Instead, Dan suggests, let’s just give the students a situation and ask an interesting question about it. He’s collected a bunch of interesting photos and videos at 101qs.com - check it out!
I wanted to help teachers get this done. Dave Major made a neat proof of concept for some full lessons, but I shot for just the opener. You can use this new mini-app to get your class started, and then the rest of the structure is up to you and your teaching skills.
If you have any programming chops, or if you want to get some for yourself, please check out the source code from github and make improvements. I have a lot of ideas for what this could become, and I want to help you make it better. This is not connected to ActiveGrade in any way (except the temporary name) so I won’t be able to dedicate the time it (might) deserve. Please help!
Go here for the app: http://activeprompt.herokuapp.com . Warning: I expect it to work. I haven’t tested it. Have a backup plan in class. Warning 2: There is no security whatsoever in the app. Anyone can delete everything at any time. Probably no one will.
Go here to help make it better: http://github.com/rileylark/activeprompt . Even if you have no tech skills, you can help with design, ideas, or by coming up with a good name!
Dan
November 25, 2012 at 7:35 pm
Awesome work, Riley!
When I get a free second, I’ll try to fork & add a couple features (maybe a blue dot that at the class average position? or a way to capture quantitative or qualitative input from students?)
dy/dan » Blog Archive » Riley Lark’s Red Dot
November 29, 2012 at 7:22 pm
[...] for an explanation of key concepts. Riley Lark is helping you do several of them very easily with his open source ActivePrompt project. While Dave Major and I continue to bat around very specific implementations of digital curricula, [...]
Danny
November 30, 2012 at 12:21 am
This looks pretty cool. One comment I noticed is that if you zoom in on the page, the dots don’t place properly anymore. Not sure what that would be other than a different scaling.
Rogan
November 30, 2012 at 12:36 am
Love it.
I teach science as well as maths. As a practice I uploaded a world map with tectonic plate boundaries and asked students to drag the dot where volcanoes might occur.
Not quite in keeping with the “abstraction” theme, but showed me that a simple app could have a million uses.
Kate Nowak
November 30, 2012 at 7:24 am
This is really sweet, Riley. Thank you.
This ActivePrompt Thing is Pretty Sweet « JUST TELL ME THE ANSWER
December 2, 2012 at 5:01 pm
[...] It perfectly describes my thoughts after my first block classes Thursday and Friday this week. We used a new app from Riley Lark (the ActiveGrade dude) called ActivePrompt (which is apparently a working title, real name TBA) and it works like this. [...]
Another nice idea « Point of Inflection
December 11, 2012 at 2:06 pm
[...] 2011Holistic EducationBringing the Problem to Reality RSS Another nice idea 11 DecMove the red dot to your feeling about the statement.Share this:Google [...]
David Wees
December 14, 2012 at 12:49 am
I downloaded the source code, and then realized it was in Ruby, which I do not yet know (and do not have time now to learn) and so I wrote my own version of Activeprompt in PHP. See http://davidwees.com/activeprompt/.
I’m hoping to mock up useful features. I started by adding a gallery, so you can see what other people are using – I hope to add the ability to log in, bookmark prompts, share prompts, and clone prompts. I’d prefer to be working on the same set of code, but my ignorance of Ruby is too much of a hindrance in this case. I hope you don’t mind that I’ve cloned your work.
Riley Lark
December 14, 2012 at 8:21 am
Mind?! I love it!
I’m sure my code is terrible code to learn Ruby from anyway – I didn’t know Ruby or Rails before starting. My programmer friends were starting to make fun of me, so I took a stab at making a quick app
There was definitely a significant learning curve – if I wasn’t stuck at the airport waiting for a delayed flight I never would have found the time 
Maybe we can isolate the javascript and run it like a plugin on both platforms. Hmmm…
Thanks for hacking! I hope you’ll share the source code.
David Wees
December 14, 2012 at 9:28 am
I will absolutely share the source code, I just wanted to gauge your reaction before I do. Great! Thanks for the terrific idea.
Steve Thomas
January 22, 2013 at 7:41 pm
This is a great exercise. I created a version of this using Scratch 2.0 (alpha) can be found here:http://mrstevesscience.blogspot.com/2013/01/balance-scale-test.html
The nice thing is you can use Scratch to create the images and animations etc, to support what you do. A lot easier for most teachers than coding.
Steve Thomas
January 23, 2013 at 10:24 pm
Sorry, seems it only works if you have a Scratch 2.0 password. Will repost when all can access.