I love card sorts. I teach computer science and use card sorts as a well to help categorize things.
I love having some things that clearly sort into categories, and some things that are ambiguous.
I’d like to be able to check for correctness that a few particular cards are in the same set, but ignore where the ambiguous cards where placed.
Currently I’m having students sort cards based on whether something is or isn’t an algorithm. A student could make an argument that choreography is an algorithm (because it is a sequence of instructions), or could make an argument that it is not an algorithm (because the instructions aren’t being executed by a computer, or because the instructions won’t be able to be followed exactly the same way every time – there will be slight variations in the movement).
In my ideal world I have a key that checks that the really obvious algorithm is in the “is an algorithm” set, the really obvious non-algorithm is in the “not an algorithm” set, and that “is an algorithm” and “not an algorithm” are not in the same set. I also would love to be able to source from the CL which set the choreography card is in, and then prompt the student to explain their thinking:
if the choreo card is in the “is an alg” set: “Why do you think this is an algorithm?”
else: “Why do you think this is not an algorithm?”
Right now from the sources I can just get a count of all the cards, a count of “correct” cards, and whether or not the student’s sort matches the key.
I think that card sorts are much more intuitive than a series of similar multiple choice questions, but the sources for MC give me more control on how to automatically determine if a student has met the requirements for the slide.
Not the answer you were hoping for, but here are some thoughts. The CL options you are seeing for card sorts are all I’m aware of, so there does not seem to be any way of determining where an individual card is sorted. Using several MC questions is probably the simplest solution, but you can also build a graph that emulates a card sort and gives you deeper access to where students place individual cards. Here’s one possibility: Graph "Card Sort" • Activity Builder by Desmos
It’s definitely more work to create as a teacher, and the visual is not as nice as a card sort component, but it does open up additional functionality you can’t achieve with a card sort. I hope this helps
Is there a plan to expose more of the card sort to the command layer?
Especially with the push to expand Desmos’s relevance to the humanities, I see the “check the obvious answers, encourage students to think about the ambiguous ones” to be an important potential feature of card sorts. I’m also not certain how your solution works for students with text-to-speech accommodations or who are using a translation extension to translate content on the fly.
I’d love to be able to make an answer key that only checks correctness for some of the cards, and allows me to have a “doesn’t affect correctness” box for the others (so it shows in my dashboard as incorrect if they miss an obvious one, but they don’t have to agree with me on the ambiguous choices that prompt deeper thinking.
The card sort you linked is a beautiful example of what is possible, but I’m unlikely to be able to convince a humanities teacher to code their vocab list to be sorted into categories.
Is there an official way to make feature requests?
