New Features

Synergy: Our Powerful Tools + Your Best Ideas

Real-world pedagogy and data literacy are at the heart of Tuva’s mission. Today, we are advancing that work further by enabling you to create custom activities in Tuva using your own data.

The Tuva Activity Builder allows you to place your best lesson ideas beside our powerful, accessible data visualization tools. That means the ability to quickly explore data and create, revise, and analyze graphs will be right at your students’ fingertips.

Five Reasons to Take Advantage of Tuva’s New Activity Builder

1. Strengthen Connection, Deepen Comprehension

Collect data with your students one day, then incorporate their dataset into a lesson on Tuva for the following day. Students will have a deeper connection to and comprehension of the data when they’ve collected it personally.

This deep involvement in the entire science process–from collection to sophisticated visualization and analysis–helps students see themselves as scientists, not just people learning about science.

2. You Pick the Phenomena, We Provide the Tools

Your creativity far exceeds the bounds of our Science Content Library; we simply cannot encompass every possible anchoring phenomenon. The ability to craft lessons in Tuva from your own datasets allows you to stick closely to your anchor phenomenon without sacrificing the benefits afforded by the Tuva tools.

3. Create Lessons That Speak to Your Students

Relevance drives student engagement. Use local data to center your math or science lessons around places familiar to your students. Alternatively, capitalize on your students’ unique personalities by pulling in data about topics you know interest them.

4. Make Graphing Accessible to All Learners

Our tools are designed to be accessible for learners with diverse abilities. So, when you create your lesson in Tuva you can rest assured all students will be able to engage meaningfully with data. (Learn more about Tuva’s Commitment to Accessibility.)

5. Strut Your Stuff and Help Make the Future #DataLit

You’re brilliant. Your work should be shared. You can now enable school colleagues and far-flung teacher friends to use more data in their instructional practice by sharing a direct link to your original lessons in Tuva. (And while you’re at it, remind them to hit you back. It’s a team effort.)

How to Get Started Building Lessons

Select My Datasets on the Dataset Library dropdown.
Insert or upload data.
Select the Create Activity button in the lower right corner.
Create your activity.
Select Publish.
Choose one of the options: Publish Privately or Request Public Sharing.

Now, start sharing!

Sign Up for a (FREE) Private Tutorial

We’d be glad to show you how to use the Activity Builder. Sign up for a 30-minute office hours session to meet virtually with one of our educational specialists for a one-on-one tutorial.

Tuva Bolsters Multilingual Supports

Multilingual learners are the fastest-growing population of K-12 students in the U.S. Throughout the past six months, Tuva has taken a number of steps to ensure multilingual learners have access to rigorous STEM instruction.

1. Added a Keywords Feature

Academic language differs markedly from the language used in everyday social interactions. Fluency in conversational English doesn’t equate to academic fluency. That’s because social vocabulary is usually acquired within two years, whereas academic vocabulary can take up to 10.

To support students as they develop academic vocabulary, Tuva has added a keywords feature. When students click on an underlined keyword, a definition will appear. These definitions are written at a 6th-grade reading level.

Many of Tuva’s keywords are tier two vocabulary words.

Tuva’s keyword feature defines terms not frequently heard in everyday conversation. This includes tier two vocabulary, academic language used across multiple subject areas (e.g. clarify, analyze, compare), and tier three vocabular, disciplinary-specific terminology (e.g. photosynthesis, velocity).

Other keywords are tier three vocabulary.

2. Authored WIDA-Aligned Lessons

Using the WIDA framework, we’ve begun weaving multiple English language development supports into our math and science lessons.

Language Support Tips

All learners, but especially multilingual learners, benefit from explicit instruction in academic language usage. Our newest lessons include language support tips such as sentence starters, instruction on parts of speech, or lists of helpful phrases for using data to inform, explain, or argue.

This image is a screenshot of Tuva showing a language support box. It says, "You may see different word forms of correlate. Each on serves a different purpose in speech. Verb- correlate/correlates, noun- correlation, adjective- correlated."

Prompt Discourse
Conversation with peers helps multilingual students build a more nuanced understanding of STEM concepts. It also gives learners more opportunities to practice academic vocabulary and language.

We’ve made a concerted effort to promote discourse in any new full-length lessons and activities. By adding “Discussion” prompts to the lessons, we encourage students to discuss their thinking aloud.

Try One of Tuva’s New WIDA-Aligned Lessons

Elementary STEM: Preparing for a Hurricane

A map of North America. The states are green. A white, spiral-shaped cloud is above the southeastern portion of the United States.

Secondary Math: Tackling Correlations

Six American football players in a pile. Some wear golden helmets, others wear black helmets. They are tackling someone.

Secondary Science: Sun Seekers of Turtle Island

The picture shows a rock with a spiral carved into it. A beam of sunlight hits the spiral.

Check out our other lessons intentionally designed to support multilingual learners. View our secondary STEM lessons with ELD support or our elementary STEM lessons with ELD support.

3. Enabled Easy Language Translation

Translanguaging boosts STEM comprehension. It also accelerates English language development. Thus, Tuva has prioritized making it easy for users to switch between languages in our lessons. Simply click the three dots in the upper right of the instruction panel to make the Google Translate widget appear.

A screenshot of Tuva which shows the portion of the screen where the three dots can be found.

Tuva Redoubles Commitment to Integrating Data Literacy Across the Math Curriculum

Math Content Library Revamp First Step in a Larger Effort to Support Teachers

Calls to incorporate data literacy in K-12 education are gaining momentum across the country. States like Virginia, Utah, Oregon, and California are taking major steps to create updated state standards or dedicated high school pathways.

Some of the states who’ve recently incorporated data literacy into their standards.

As a company dedicated to building a future in which all students possess data literacy and use it to contribute positively to society, Tuva applauds these changes. We also recognize implementing change takes work. Teachers, schools, and districts deserve support as they work to integrate data literacy across their math curriculum. To help maintain the momentum, Tuva is placing renewed energy on its resources for mathematics teachers.

As part of this effort, we recently revamped our math content library to make it easier for math teachers to locate lessons that will help them weave more data into their curriculum. The library has been reorganized to better reflect what teachers are teaching, with separate pages for each course.

“We’re hoping these changes will enable our math teachers to spend less time searching and more time teaching,” explained Tuva Math Educational Specialist Colleen McEnearney.

The content in the library has not changed; the navigation system has. Teachers are prompted to select a course: 6th-grade math, 7th-grade math, 8th-grade math, algebra 1, algebra 2, or statistics/AP statistics.

Each course page is divided into the big ideas of that course. These big idea buckets represent areas within each course where real-world data can greatly enhance students’ understanding of the content. For example, the 8th-grade math page includes the big ideas: interpreting scatter plots and associations; informal linear models; two-way tables; and formal linear models.

All lessons connected to a big idea are clustered on the page, so teachers can scroll through them all at once.

Previously, teachers had the option to sort lessons by course or concept, but this posed challenges. When filtering by course, they would see all lessons related to the course’s standards, requiring manual searching for specific concepts. Searching by concept, while possible, often resulted in diverse grade-level materials, necessitating manual sifting for grade-appropriate content within the old organizational system.

Tuva’s math content library revamp eliminates these time-consuming issues and makes finding the just-right lesson much more efficient. Explore our newly remodeled math content library.

Tuva’s New Feature Enables Teachers to Customize Activities

Tuva is excited to announce the release of a feature that makes it possible for teachers to customize activities. The ability to copy and revise activities went live this past Friday.

Previously, if a teacher wanted to change something minor, it was a time-consuming process. First they had to create a brand new activity using Tuva’s activity builder and copy the text of each question one at a time. Then they could make the desired changes. Now, teachers can customize in a fraction of the time.

“We are excited to support our teachers in the new school year with the launch of this feature. Teachers can now easily edit and personalize Tuva’s library of inquiry-based science and math lessons to meet the unique needs of their classrooms and students,” said Tuva co-founder and CEO Harshil Parikh.

Tuva Premium subscribers are able to copy and revise any activity in Tuva’s extensive math and science content library, which currently houses more than 350 activities.

Tuva Basic teachers can take advantage of this feature for all of Tuva’s free math and science activities.

Introducing a Brand New Tuva Datasets Library

We are excited to unveil a brand new look to the Tuva Datasets Library!

As the number of datasets, activities, and lessons continues to increase on the Tuva platform, we are striving to make it easy for you to filter and find the right curriculum resource that meets your needs.

save image — Screenshot of the new Tuva Datasets Library

The new Tuva Datasets Library page is arranged as follows:

Find all the Filter categories and sub-categories on the left sidebar.
Filter by Subject / Topic, Grade Level, Science (NGSS Core Ideas), Math topic, Dataset Size, Place / Region, and Language.
Easily switch between 15 free datasets (Tuva Basic) and All datasets (Tuva Premium) in the library.
Easily toggle between Block View and List View for all resources.
Quickly find all the archived datasets and activities.

Stay tuned for additional updates and enhancements to the new Tuva Datasets Library!