When I checked the youtube stats this morning I saw that Root Spiral of Theodorus, my most popular animation, had 30,003 views—a palindrome, as a little frosting on the cake!
The total number of views for all my videos is over 65,000 now. Currently nearly 80% of the viewers are from India, while a little over 10% of the views are from the USA.
Just passed 50K total views worldwide on my math video animations channel! Root Spiral of Theodorus is the most popular with over 18K views. Leading countries (currently) are India (53%), USA (18%), and UAE (13%).
Until a few years ago, I didn’t know Theodorus from brontosaurus. But then, somehow, I heard about it, and thought it could be a simple and beautiful way for kids (and other people) to start to get the hang of square roots as length.
I thought I could probably do an animation of it in PowerPoint. I did, and after a bit of fussing, Root Spiral of Theodorus was the result.
It’s been quite popular: over 18,000 views since I uploaded it last April. If you google “root spiral of theodorus”, it comes up #2 out of 26,300 results, right after Wikipedia.
If you like this one enough to use with your students, as with all my other animations, you can download the PowerPoint file from my “Animations” folder and have a version you can teach with, turning off the timed settings and advancing it slide by slide to suit your purposes, or even modify the content to according to your whim or needs. I’d like to get credit, naturally, but if you’d prefer simply stealing it, oh well….
My YouTube channel, youtube.com/user/bikes4fish, just passed 35,000 views!
“Root Spiral of Theodorus” has been the most popular lately—over 7500 views in the 9 months since I posted it. But the most popular overall in total views is still “Composition of Rigid Motions (translation, rotation, and reflection)” with nearly 14,000 views since I posted it 3 years ago.
I got an early start this morning and posted Power Point .pptx slide shows for each of my 6 youtube video animations—the 3 basic rigid motions ones and the 3 Pythagorean Theorem ones. I put them in Animations so interested people could download the slide shows in pptx form and modify to their hearts’ content. If you want to use any of them for teaching, you could make some changes in Power Point: un-select the “Use Timings” box if it’s selected, and for a lot of the animations, change the Animations Options from “Start: After Previous” to “Start: On Click”. This will enable you to “drive” the presentation yourself, advancing the slides and animations to suit the pacing of your lesson with your students. Of course, it will also enable you to change things to suit your own aesthetic sensibilities. Go crazy.
This animation, along with encouragement from Hung-Hsi Wu, got me started doing youtube videos to help kids (maybe their teachers too) get a better feel for math, geometry in particular. A lot of kids who struggle in math don’t picture what’s going on. Doing geometry with no picture is like trying to work on a computer with no monitor connected: you’re in the dark and you stay there. This short animation is one of my attempts to help kids “get the picture”.
Links to this video appeared in Wu’s “Teaching Geometry According to the Common Core Standards” and “Teaching Geometry in Grade 8 and High School According to the Common Core Standards”, both of which you can download (for free) from Wu’s homepage, https://math.berkeley.edu/~wu/.