Chatbots are often a wall of text, and when it comes to mathematics, it can be a wall of equations and/or a wall of data. As math teachers, we want to make sure we’re always providing visualizations of the mathematics we’re working with. We really appreciate the kind generosity of the Desmos folks who have allowed us the use of their graphing system (and from a programming side, the production of an elegant API we can plug in to!)
If the teacher is in a discussion with chatOAME and the reply involves an important function, chatOAME will shadow the equation in green and create a Desmos graph “chip” next to the function in the reply.
When you click on the Desmos chip, a pop-up window will appear with the graph of the function. When it’s y = 3x + 2, it’s an easy process.
If the equation is more complicated, say f(t) = t^2, chatOAME will map the f(t) to y and will map the independent variable to x, since Desmos only understands functions (well, it does relations, too) in x and y. Any other variable or parameter is assigned a slider! It will let you know the mapping as a text note at the bottom of the equation column.
The function/relation/equation parsing is not perfect (yet?) As math teachers know, there’s a lot of representations that LOOK like graphable functions, but we don’t want all of them graphed. If you find one that should or shouldn’t have been given a Desmos chip, send me (oame.ai@oame.on.ca) a screenshot of your prompt and it will let me tighten the code. Yes, this would let me know “who” you are and we value privacy at chatOAME, but I will only remember your genorosity, not that you had to ask chatOAME what a parabola looked like 🙂
chatOAME will also notice when the reply to the teacher has a table of data — this happens a lot when teachers used the REAL DATA option, especially with the World Bank or SDG option.
chatOAME will track down real data that approximate a line or an exponential relationship and give you the table of data and by clicking on the Desmos chip, you’ll get a Desmos scatterplot of the data in the table (whether it’s vertical/horizontal or has multiple columns!)
And it tries to pick a nice window to see the data — we leave years as 2019 so you may have to manually re-map it as “19” or whatever you’re using as a year starting point, etc.
We hope you find this useful and that it encourages visualizing data and equations!
