Summer of Math Exposition

Well explained but I was loosing interest half way through.

First of all, just some general editing tips — The thumbnail was a bit pixelated. (Update-I’ve reviewed some more videos and pretty much all of them have blurry thumbnails so I think it’s just and issue with the website) Make sure when you cut between audio that you add some cross fade. Additionally, I’m not sure if you did this, but some words sound like they are spliced in (ie you misspoke so you rerecord those words?). If you are doing this, make sure you rerecord whole sentences and not just words so it’s less noticeable. At 7:22, having the equations in the corners means my eyes have to move all the way across the screen! My 2 brain cells are already working really hard to absorb the video, don’t make my eyes work too!

Motivation (8) - Great! This might have just been me as I recently saw another video on line drawing so I was already interested in the topic.

Clarity (7) - 7:30 when you use Nabla here I had to go back into the video to recall what nabla was for. It would be a good idea to pause before the equations and summarize everything that you have covered so far. Then, tie them all together. Also a much simpler (and more visual) explanation for using r’ and q’ instead of r and q would be with similar triangles (then you also don’t need equations at all - equations are mentally taxing)!

Novelty (4) - my main quip with this video is that a lot of good videos already exist about line drawing. As I mentioned, I just recently saw a video on this.

Memorability (8) - explanations were relatively easy to follow, so in a week’s time I would definitely be able to recall the concepts.

The animations are great, but the video spends far too much time on elementary algebraic manipulations, would have also loved to see pixels being filled as the line is drawn and a discussion of anti aliasing.

Motivation: You explained that the application in computer graphics well. When you said something like “how would you choose which point to go to?” my initial answer was to choose the minimum of q’ and r’ in the first place, rather than computing the perpendicular distances. If it’s important that we’re computing the equivalent of the perpendicular differences you should explain why - because you could just jump straight to choosing between r’ and q’ if you wanted. Also it might have been interesting to compare the computational time between the different methods to show that this was an important improvement.

Clarity: It was mostly clear. I would just make two points:

1. You say at one point something like “we can divide by q’ [a distance] because distances are greater than 0” but if the line we’re trying to approximate coincides with a grid point then the distance q’ could be 0.
2. I thought that the explanations were a little slow, if you’re going to rearrange a formula I think it might be easier to jump to the end rather than showing a sequence of equations quickly on the screen. If it’s just algebraic computation then I don’t find it interesting.

Novelty: I hadn’t seen anyone talking about this problem before so it was new to me.

Memorability: It’s kind of related to the clarity comment - I think that it could have been more memorable if we’d had a quick overview of the algorithm at some point rather than always being in the detail. Or maybe a demo of it running.

Nice video and a good explanation. I feel like the presentation was a bit too fast. Some of the substitutions/re-definitions happened very quickly and you were on to the next thing before I had time to digest what you had just done. In terms of the actual information, I think you totally nailed your target audience. High-school students should absolutely be able to understand this but, again, I think it could benefit by just slowing down a little and lingering on each step slightly longer.

No it was pretty good on parsimony!