Desmos

Desmos is well known by most college and high school students that have ever taken a math class. The reason being, it is an extremely useful and highly functioning graphing utility. In fact, it is so useful that it has made its way into research papers, doctoral lectures, and so much more. The main reason that Desmos has become so popular is that it allows for each variable to be changed with a slider and shows the graphical representation in real time. This functions helps with the understanding of the underlying effect an individual variable has on a function intuitively. However, this is not the only feature that makes Desmos useful.

As we just discussed, Desmos is great for representing functions graphically and quickly demonstrating the impact of a single variable. This is helpful in basic algebra when showing how each coefficient affects the shape of a parabola. However, its applications range much greater. Even in graduate level manufacturing classes at top universities, professors use Desmos to demonstrate constraints of an optimization problem. Sounds like a mouthful, does it not? That is just more proof of how universal of a tool Desmos can be, from the simplest to hardest math problems.

Desmos has other functions too. It can be used as a basic graphing utility, where it can be utilized to show a nice looking graph for a presentation. This is where it generally shines in work environments, but do not discount its other functionalities as well. Another useful feature is that Desmos can calculate certain problems that other people have solved for it. One example of this is the Desmos discriminant solver for quadratic equations, but there are literally tons of other individual calculators created by people to solve problems in Desmos. This brings us to the third great functionality, which is sharing graphs, equations, and other mathematical functions between people in an easy way. Desmos formatting allows for easy transcription and understanding between a sending and receiving party and sending an individualized problem set is just as easy as copying a link and sending an email. This also makes it a great tool for academic and professional environments.

Desmos is an extremely well feature application for its use and for that, students all over the world use it as one of the most popular problem solving applications on the Internet. It is rivaled by very few tools that can even come close to replicating its functionality. Any other solution to the same problem using involves writing your own code, so this is a good solution for non-programmers.

Pros

• Great and easy to use graphing utility
• Can serve several functions on multiple planes to solve complex problems
• Free to use for all

Cons

• Overly simple software can make it difficult to input higher level mathematics
• Simple interface can make it hard to see all inputs at once
• Missing functionality available in other alternatives