The Matrix as a User Interface
Audience: high-schoolundergraduate
What if you had a Matrix widget that you could program with? The video shows a Python library that let's you add matrices to a notebook that you can interact with. Every number becomes a draggable slider and ... it can also control the rest of the notebook! So it can update charts, re-run cells and interact with numpy/algorithms. This opens up many doors and invites one to do some deliberate play as they explore linear algebra. You're not just watching a video, you can be an active participant as you explore different matrices! The goal of the video is to inspire folks to play along as we demonstrate a few fun things that you can do with these tools.
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Love the connection of interactivity to learning.
Very cool video and tool. I tried it. Probably very good for educational/teaching purposes. So perfect for this year’s SoME.
Amazing way to interactively play with matrices strengthens the already known concepts into observable artefacts
Super fun! I deal with matrices all the time, and the explanation and viz go a long way. Wish he got into the spectral decompositions of matrices (those rotation components also work for imaginary eigenvalues), but considering this is tagged “high-school”, I think it’s fine. Also loved the interactive pairing with it, fun tool to add to my toolkit
This surley is a very good way of learning linear algebra! I personally didn’t really like the whole ‘meta analysis’ parts in the middle of the video where you were like ‘oh, I’m lokking into this because I’ve seen it in the interface’. I agree that this is probably a very good learning experiance but at some point, emphasizing it felt a bit forced. Just one explanation at the beginning would be enough in my opinion.
I totally enjoyed your philosophy of “deliberately playing,” in order to actively participate in learning how to visualize tuples of a system of equations on a plane. Small critique of adding ”-” or ”+” on the sliders as one plays through for e.g. the changing a coordinate section. (That said, I see I can still iterate one unit using left and arrow keys, so it might be helpful for users who wouldn’t otherwise play). I’m bookmarking this as what marimo has built seems to be a bit more than Matrix as an Interface and I’m glad I found your work through SoME. Please keep making more videos and hope to see you for the next SoME year! The Ranking score you received is an average of these individual scores, good luck! Motivation: 9 Clarity: 7.75 Novelty: 8.75 Memorability: 7.25
To my taste, the best video I’ve seen during this voting process so far. Interactive, engaging, unique…
Wow! This was great. I love that it is interactive, although given the setting in the VOTE box, I was not able to “play” with the matrices. I intend to go back when it is just on YouTube and to play then. I would have appreciated if he explained what was happening when the entries in the RGB matrix went to negatives (especially negatives less than -1) and what happened and why when those values were greater than +1. Showing that when multiplied by the 2x2 matrix [1,1,, 1 1] led to [G+B, G+B] and that this was shown by a straight line where x = y and that the upper rightmost point was a little more than 500, could have been explained in a little more detail, granted it was 256 + 256 = 512, but the author went through this very fast and a student seeing this might puzzle over it and miss some of what followed. I really liked the graphic demonstration with colored dots and the inactive nature of the video. Great Job!
Neat way to explain some of the basics of linear algebra