Tile Pile has been officially retired and is no longer available from teacher.desmos.com or student.desmos.com. This means that teacher dashboards for this activity will no longer be accessible and students can no longer join or revisit Tile Pile lessons. All session codes for Tile Pile have been expired.

Why?

Tile Pile was one of the first activities built by Desmos. It was the result of a collaboration between Desmos, and the brilliant folks at Smarter Balanced and Illustrative Mathematics. It was an inspiration for a lot of the design behind the social and creative activities on teacher.desmos.com.

Over the years as our activities and technology evolved, we’ve developed new tools for orchestrating classroom discussions, for securing classes and student data, and for designing for accessibility. Tile Pile hasn’t benefited from these improvements, so we’ve made the hard decision to retire it.

I miss it.

That’s not a question! And so do we. If you’d still like to explore the activity, or try to solve the Z-Tile puzzle, you can find an exact working demo of the entire experience in the Desmos Museum.

For an alternative activity covering similar mathematical content, you might want to check out Balloon Float.