As of a month or so ago, the activity builder automatically prompted me to enable or disable a scientific calculator when I created activities. When enabled, the calculator button would appear at the top center of student’s screen, as shown in the image I’ve uploaded. But I’m no longer seeing an option for enabling/disabling the calculator. Anyone know about this?
Desmos Scientific Calculator|690x387
open the activity details menu:
Theres a checkbox at the bottom to enable the scientific calculator:
Thanks for the quick and helpful response!
I just added this to one of my lessons today!
I love that the calculator lets you save variables…
Does anyone know if it’s possible to enable the calculator for the lesson as a whole, but disable it on specific screens?
You can! In the screen level script use the sink disableCalculatorReason followed by a non empty string.
For example, disableCalculatorReason: “Try solving these problems in your head.” would display that message over a disabled calculator on the screen.
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I tried using that, but it is not working. Can you help me?
Thank you for your quick response, however it is saying that it cannot find the sink.
Would you mind linking to the activity so we can get a look at the possible issue?
Yes! Thank you so much. Grade 6 End of the Year Assessment • Activity Builder by Desmos
It looks like the scientific calculator isn’t enabled, so I’m guessing that’s why the error message shows up. If you click on the activity title in the upper left, a menu will pop up that allows you to edit the title. At the bottom of that screen, you can turn on the calculator. From there, you should be able to use the code shown previously.
Hi, I’ve tried that and it didn’t work. Maybe I’ll enable the calculator, click save and then try the code again in hopes that it works. Thank you!
Here’s a copy of your activity. I turned on the scientific calculator, and then on screen 7 I entered the code. If you preview screen 7, you will see that if you attempt to click on the calculator at the top of the screen the warning message pops up. Please let me know when you’re done looking at the code because I’d like to delete this activity from my collection.
I think I was putting the disable calculator link in the wrong section…thank you so so much!!!
it worked! I can’t thank you enough!
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I would love to see a CL screen-level “enableScientificCalculator”. I may have a longer activity and only 1-2 screens where I want the calculator available, and I would really prefer to only have it showing on those screens. Is there a way to do that?
Unless there is a new sink that allows this, I think you would have to enable the calculator on the title edit screen and just disable the calculator using CL on each screen that’s not needed.
Thanks, but I don’t want the scientific calculator enabled; therefore, it is unchecked. Yet, if you look at the tables on each screen (after the first 2), a student still has the ability to use a calculator, which defeats the purpose of the activity…to build multiplication fact fluency. (I’m not the original author of this activity, just trying to edit if for my purposes.)
You need to set cellDisableEvaluation(1,1): false for each individual cell in the table.