Comment by tieandjeans
6 days ago
Amplify (neé Desmos) builds great tools and manipulatives that are great for classroom use and curious play. Read more of the pedagogy behind these tools on Mathworlds. https://danmeyer.substack.com/
6 days ago
Amplify (neé Desmos) builds great tools and manipulatives that are great for classroom use and curious play. Read more of the pedagogy behind these tools on Mathworlds. https://danmeyer.substack.com/
> Amplify (neé Desmos)
It looks like "Amplify Education, Inc" and "Desmos Studio" (Public Benefit Corporation) are separate entities.
The desmos website still shows that most of the Desmos "math tools" still exist under the Desmos name (graphing calculator, scientific calculator, four function, matrix, geometry, 3D), but that "Desmos Classroom" specifically has been renamed to "Amplify Classroom" [1].
The amplify usage guidelines [2] say that "Amplify does not own but partners with Desmos Studio, the maker of a suite of free math tools, including a graphing calculator used by over 75 million people around the world. (See desmos.com for more information.)"
[1]: https://www.desmos.com/
[2]: https://amplify.com/ac-usage-guidelines/
Yes – CTO of Amplify here.
As a sibling poster notes, the Desmos calculator and math tools spun out to Desmos Studio PBC, which has a bunch of great people – with the goal of ensuring those remain available to all and not tied to a single curriculum provider. The Desmos Classroom tools for social, interactive classroom instruction, and another bunch of great colleagues, are part of Amplify, which together with Polypad and other tooling, make up Amplify Classroom ( https://classroom.amplify.com ), powering terrific IMO math, science and English curricula.
It's been a lot of fun – and a lot of tricky work! – bringing all of these tools and humans together.
I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that we are hiring, including for Software Engineer, Analytics Engineer, Data Engineer, and AI Engineer positions at various levels :)
https://amplify.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/Amplify_Careers
(Since you're in the thread, can I ask you to give kudos to whoever's kept the original "Let's Explore Geography! Canadian Commodities Trader Simulation Exercise" class code active all these years? I think you might have even changed the multiple-choice component to better support the weird thing I was doing with empty choice text.)
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It was kind of an unusual reorg. Desmos used to have a team making curriculum and classroom activities in addition to the graphing calculator. Most of these were essentially just graphs made in the graphing calculator, taking advantage of features like image embedding and draggable points, wrapped in a little scripting language and slideshow UI. When education people talk about "manipulatives", it's usually these kinds of simpler activities and not the whole graphing calculator.
That team got acquired by Amplify, and eventually the "Desmos Classroom" tool used to make the activities got acquired by Amplify too, leaving Desmos with just the more consumer-focused graphing calculator stuff. Amplify also acquired this other "Polypad" product and kind of merged the two together into what's now called "Amplify Classroom".
I think Amplify is still selling/distributing a lot of the activities that were originally made by the Desmos people.
For anyone reading Dan Meyer's blog for the first time, I'd highly recommend you search the archives for an article about a topic you know well. And use that to help you decide how much to trust Dan's opinion on other stuff, and whether his perspective aligns with yours.
He wrote an article heavily criticizing Math Academy's approach here: https://open.substack.com/pub/danmeyer/p/it-is-fun-to-preten...
But there's no evidence that he's tested it with a student in the target market!
He does link to article by Michael Pershan, who did kick the tires, but again, he didn't use it as intended over any reasonable period of time.
Based on their credentials, both Dan and Michael are people you'd hope you could trust if you want to learn about how to teach your kid math. Dan did his PhD at Stanford (under Dr Boaler) and Michael has been a math teacher for years, and has written at least one good book on the topic.
But they each seem to have a knee jerk reaction to anything that hints that it might replace human teachers, or anything that's only useful to a subset of students.