Interactive Amplify Maths lessons for middle school.

Year 7 are consolidating equivalence between fractions, decimals and percentages. In a Desmos Classroom activity the teacher has built with draggable labelled points, each student drags ten values, including 3/4, 0.7, 65% and 2/5, onto a number line from 0 to 1, and nothing snaps into place, so a student who puts 0.7 to the left of 65% leaves a visible mistake that can be argued over. A second screen zooms in on the stretch between 0.6 and 0.8 with five new values, such as 5/8, 0.66 and 70%, which is where the close comparisons are. The teacher watches every student's line form on the dashboard, sends pairs whose placements disagree to argue it out, and pauses the class with an anonymised snapshot of two lines side by side. The department ran this lesson for years as a washing line across the room, where ten volunteers pegged a card each while everyone else watched.

Tools: Desmos Nine ideas for your own version in Generate

The teacher builds a Desmos activity with a four-quadrant grid and reads out the vertices of a shape one at a time, such as (3, 2), (−1, 4), (−2, −3) and (5, −1). Students plot each point on their own screen and join them up. The teacher's dashboard can overlay every student's points on one grid, so a cluster at (4, −1) instead of (−1, 4) shows at once that some students are reading y before x. The teacher pauses the class, shows the overlay without names, and students restate the rule of across first, then up or down, before plotting a second shape that looks right only when every point is correct.

Tools: Desmos Nine ideas for your own version in Generate

The teacher writes a Kahoot of twelve linear equations, from 3x + 5 = 20 to 4(x − 2) = 2x + 6, and builds each wrong option from a real error: subtracting 5 from one side only, dividing before subtracting, or expanding the bracket as 4x − 2. Students join with their first name and play live. After each question Kahoot shows how many chose each answer, and when a wrong option draws a large share the teacher stops the game, asks a student to explain the step that leads to that answer, and works a similar equation on the board. At the end the teacher downloads the report to plan starters for the next lesson.

Tools: Kahoot! Nine ideas for your own version in Generate

Year 9 sit an algebra assessment on Friday. On Tuesday the teacher sets a Seneca assignment covering the four skills on the paper: expanding a single bracket, expanding double brackets, factorising into a single bracket and factorising quadratics. Students work through short explanations and questions, and Seneca brings back the ideas each student gets wrong later in the session, so a student who is unsure about factorising meets it several more times than a classmate who is secure. On Thursday the teacher checks the class results, finds that double brackets are secure and factorising quadratics is not, and rebuilds Friday's warm-up around the weakest skill using the same question types.

Tools: Seneca Learning Nine ideas for your own version in Generate

The teacher poses three questions: how likely are five heads in a row, is a total of 7 or a total of 6 more likely with two dice, and is getting at least one six in four rolls more or less likely than not, the puzzle the Chevalier de Méré brought to Pascal. Students vote on each in a Mentimeter poll before anything is run. Each student then opens their own tab of a teacher-built Google Sheet where RANDBETWEEN simulates 1,000 trials of each question, re-runs it a few times by typing in any cell, and enters their results on a class summary tab that adds up the class's 30,000 trials. The teacher compares the pooled results with the predictions and the theoretical answers (1/32, 6/36 against 5/36, and about 52%), and students write one sentence on which of their intuitions was wrong and why.

Tools: Google Sheets, Mentimeter Nine ideas for your own version in Generate