Virtual Motion Graph Matchmakers

This activity is intended to help interpret the overall shapes of displacement vs time and velocity vs time graphs. By conceptually describing the motion represented by the different shapes students build a schema of patterns to help make sense of these graphs once those pesky numbers get involved :)

This blog post is a sequel to the physical version of this task that can be found HERE.

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"Basic Motion" vs "Advanced Motion"

​I made a couple of different versions so that I could use this with my general level 9th grade physical science classes as well as my 12th grade IB Physics classes. The main difference is that the "basic" version only contains graphs representing constant velocity, and speeding up/slowing down in the positive direction.

Matchmakers - Basic

Matchmakers - Advanced

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Desmos Card Sort Basics

I made this task virtual by tapping into the power of Desmos. This is such an amazing tool and I want to highlight a couple of useful features to help those who are new to this program.

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Copy/Edit

If you aren't entirely happy with a particular question and want to change or remove it, you can just create a copy and make your updates

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Assigning to a Class

If you are doing this card sort as a stand alone and don't have other Desmos Activity, I recommend just creating a "single session code". This will give you a link to send out to students so that they can log in through a browser as well as a code, if they want to type it into student.desmos.com.

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Card Sort Feedback

To add automatic feedback for students, I needed to add a "computation layer" (CL) on top of the activity. There's a little bit of code required but it's really pretty easy.

• Create an answer key for the card sort
• Name your card sort something distinguishable like "sort1"
• Add a blank screen that contains a note and a button
• Name the button something distinguishable like "cardcheck1" and edit the label to say something like "Check Card Sort"

• In the note, click on the computation layer button (</>) and add the code below. Note, if you have more than one card sort in the activity, you will need to update the "sort1" and "cardcheck1" tags with other unique names that reference the card sort on the screen before

CODE:

content: when sort1.matchesKey "You got them all correct! Great job! 🥇"
when cardcheck1.timeSincePress>0 and not(sort1.matchesKey) "You have ${sort1.totalCorrectCards} out of ${sort1.totalCards} cards correct. Keep trying!" 
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otherwise 
"When you are done with the card sort on the previous slide, you may click the \"Check Card Sort\" button to see if you are correct."

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Pacing

If you choose to do this synchronously, I have found that it works really well to use the pacing feature in the teacher dashboard. When I use this, I restrict students to a single card sort and it's corresponding feedback slide. This way students can jump back and forth checking their work but can't move ahead before I have a chance to talk through the task with the class :)

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The Card Sort Progression

In the physical version of this task, I would usually give each student a graph to be a champion of to find their match and answer questions that I posed to the full class. In this case, all students have access to the full set of graphs but are asked to go through a progression of questions that highlight key features and types of motion. For each mini card sort, students are given general feedback on how many cards they have correctly grouped so they can revise as needed before moving on.

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Other Files

One of the things that makes this task work so well is the clean and easy to read graphs. The link below leads to a google drive folder with all of these graphs as individual files. For the editable files, see the original Motion Graph Matchmakers blog post.

Motion Graph Matchmakers - Individual Graphs

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​Click for more Motion resources ​⬇