I learned how to program in the Desmos Computation Layer (CL) out of necessity. Planning for the pandemic school year, I wanted to try to program real-time feedback into all of my lessons and homework expecting students would frequently work independently. To date, I’ve created over 200 activities – mostly taking Illustrative Mathematics curricular materials and translating them into Desmos.
Two resources that I would recommend as you get stuck are the Desmos CL Support Forum and the Desmos Educators Facebook Group. There are a lot teachers that will nearly immediately answer any questions that you have.
A lot of my learning was trial and error, so I caveat these by saying that there may be other ways to code these. This is just what works for me. Below is my attempt to synthesize what I’ve learned so far:
How to program feedback into a Desmos activity
How to use the “correct:” sink to auto-grade a Desmos problem
How to create a graph from student input using the “differenceFunction:” command
How to evaluate inequalities in Desmos activities using parseInequality
How to program a writing prompt into a Desmos activity