Quotient Expression and Letter Answer

On my slides 4, 5, and 6 found at 7-2 and 7-3 Similar Figures: Using Proportions to Solve for Missing Sides (Day 2) • Activity Builder by Desmos I have been struggling to maneuver a way to mark the slide as either correct or incorrect.

When looking at slide 4, the answers from top to bottom are <P, <M, and <N which are not numeric. When I tried putting the correct answer as an expression, then using latex, it did not work as it had before.

On the last answer, it will be many quotients set equal to one another. An example would be the image attached below:
image

I am not even sure where to start when it comes to giving immediate feedback for correctness. Looking at my other slides you can get an idea of how I always want the word “Correct!” or “Please try again.” to pop up once the slide is submitted.

If anyone has any advice please let me know! I am completely stuck.

I’m not sure if using patterns will be useful here. In the past, the second = makes this sort of unworkable without using many permutations of latex matching.

You might be better off using a different type of component as it’s not recommended to match latex. Is this something that you think could work for multiple choice or a card sort?

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Here I made a graph to do some drag and drop matching. You could do something similar for the side proportions.

Daniel just posted while I was writing this, and I can tell already it is a better workaround than mine, but I am going to finish this post.
These guys aren’t wrong, and both of them have been so helpful to me on this site, I am surprised they aren’t employed by Desmos. Or are they? Not wrong I mean, but employed by Desmos.
I linked what I would have done below, but it did bring up some interesting questions.
It bothered me that I couldn’t get \angle to show up in the code or use as an initial latex so the students had the symbol in their answers. Am I doing something wrong with it, or is it not included in the symbols?
She asked this in her original post, but I think it got missed–using the less than symbol as a workaround also won’t work when matching latex.
This works,
correct = this.latex = x<5,
but this does not,
correct = this.latex = <P
I like using initial latex in some of my activities, but it can be frustrating–if the student deletes it from the input, they won’t get an answer correct. I read an interesting post asking Desmos to treat is like suffix so the students can’t delete it from their answers.
Lastly, getting all the permutations is kinda crazy, but I tend to do just that especially if it is just one slide. I just keep using copy and paste of or this.latex = \frac{JK}{PM}=\frac{JL}{PN}` and get there eventually.
Thanks to Daniel and Craig for how amazingly helpful they are on this site.

I copy/pasted after searching Google (I also saved a bunch of symbols and emoji into another activity, so I have them in one place.)

No, I personally am not employed, but I don’t think @cwinske is either. Thanks though!

Here’s another graph for the proportions. (Fixed the K_ey)

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I was able to copy and paste it as the symbol ∠, and it shows up as the initial text in the math input. But then it won’t show as correct when I use this code:
correct = this.latex = ∠P
correct: correct
initialLatex:

So I thought it was the symbol, like when students enter 1/2 into math input, but the code has to read,
\frac{1}{2}
But this doesn’t work either:
correct = this.latex = \angleP
correct: correct
initialLatex: \angle

So what is wrong with the code? Probably super easy again.
I’ll be using content like this when I get to the geometry unit, so better to learn now anyway.

Uh, that drag and drop is way better anyway. I am saving it for future activities.

Thanks so much @Daniel_Grubbs

I love the matching idea! I have never looked into how to make a code for it to show students that where they dragged their tiles is correct.

Any final advice on how to do that?

I integrated that into both matching graphs in the Corrections folders. Putting this in your graph CL should result in a dashboard checkmark:

correct: this.number(`C_{orrect}`)=0

In the first, there’s one correct answer, although I thought the picture was a little ambiguous and may have chosen incorrectly (i.e. it looked near isosceles to me). What I did (list C_heck) was check that the distance between the answer box centers (list C) were within a quarter the side length (d) of the correct answer label point (list K_ey). So list C_heck is 0 for correct, 1 for incorrect. When the total of those (C_orrect) is 0 then all three are correct.

(Looking back, I think I had the K_ey wrong and fixed it, and changed to this link in the previous post.)
For the proportions, I had to do a little trickery. L_1 and L_2 are lists of the corresponding sides for the two triangles. I checked if the x coordinates of those corresponding sides were within a certain range (i.e. they were stacked one above the other). Then, checked if all of L_1 were above or below the (hidden) x-axis, and that L_2 were the opposite (i.e. one triangle is the numerators and the other denominators).

Sounds good! I am going to play around with it and then post my final result so anyone with the same question can see it.

After the help, my solution/final product can be found here on slides 4, 5, and 6!

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