I'm Eli. I'm the founder and CEO of a
company called Desmos and I want to
tell you a little bit about Desmos and
the philosophy behind it and hopefully
ways that it could actually be useful to
you in your classroom with your students.
So Desmos got its start about
seven years ago completely by accident.
And the back story there is that I was a
tutor in Westport Connecticut. Education
has been my thing for a very long time.
And, for a long time I thought this
solution to education was tutoring, its
one-on-one help. And, this is from reading
papers that showed how impactful those
were. And, one of the things that I
realized very early on with my students,
who I was tutoring, was that by giving
them a way to connect representations
and to play, rather than mathematics
themselves, to put them in the driver's
seat, the concepts that had formerly been
really difficult became much, much easier
to picture. But, the other realization I
had is that I wanted this to be in the
hands of every single student not just
in the hands of the kids that I was
tutoring in Westport. And, so at the
beginning of 2012, launched the Desmos
graphing calculator and committed from
the first day that we wanted it to be
free. That we wanted it to be something
that every student could access wherever
they were. And, if I'm being honest I had
no idea that it was gonna be a company. I
had no idea that people were gonna want
it. And, within a few days of launching it
and had thousands of people who are
using it, and, we realized that we found,
we found a really fundamental pain that
a lot of people were feeling. Which is
that graphing is such a critical,
critical part of so much of mathematics.
And, handheld calculators were hard to
use but more importantly they're really
expensive. And, this was a big barrier to
a lot of students who wanted to explore
math. And, so for the last, for the last six
years we've just been laser focused on
this idea of making this tool that
anyone can use on any device that they
have. You just go to it in the browser.
And, at the same time trying to make it
as easy and fun to use as possible. And,
we measure this really carefully and we
watch students use it. And, my favorite
thing is when you put Desmos in
front of a fourth or a fifth grader who
is just learning this stuff for the
first time, and they type in something
and it works. And, then they feel like
they're in charge. They feel like they're
the owner of the mathematics. Not that
the mathematics is this black box that
isn't for them. One of our company values
is this idea of works every time. We
think it's just so important, especially
for students who are lacking in math
confidence. But they come, and they do
something, and they feel like this tool
is working with them as opposed to being
a scary complicated thing that they need
to read a substantial instruction
manual for. I'm so, so, some fun statistics
about what we've seen happen with our
success in that. This year, this school
year, about 50 million people are going
to use Desmos from around the world.
We're now built into the state exams in
24 states and were built into the
digital SAT. And, all of this would this
idea of making the tool that students
are able to practice on for free at home
in the safety of wherever they want to
be learning math. But, it's the same thing
that they use equitably when they come
into a high-stakes environment. So, that's
been really gratifying.
We've also since expanded to support
students and teachers in other ways. So,
we now have a team of just some of the
strongest educators that we were able to
find. Led by a gentleman, Dan Meyer, with
this idea of trying to build classroom
activities that let students be the
creators. Let them think creatively. Let
teachers have deep insights into how
students are thinking. So, kind of the
antithesis of every student in a box,
typing numbers into boxes, and instead,
having students learning as a group, but,
being the ones who are actually creating
the mathematics as they go. So, all of
that is also free on teacher.desmos.com.
Would love if you, if you checked
out those resources and if there's
anything that you think we can do to
make those most work better for you or
for your students send us a note. We're
on Twitter and we're on email and this
is how we improve.
