Summer of Math Exposition

Great narration and clip usage. You introduced the video well, with a good introduction and you provided a detailed description. Your jokes were also very funny.

One of the most creative videos I’ve seen so far in Some5. Nice work!

The contents of the explainer were good, but I think it would’ve helped the viewer to focus more if you have a clearer question that you ask right upfront at the beginning of the video. “Make tangrams with math” is not a very clear goal, but that’s as much as we get in the first few minutes - apparently you mean “make shapes that are able to be translated, rotated, and flipped in Desmos.”

The actual explanations are good, though I can nitpick. For translations, you decided to use straight lines as your example to explain why we subtract. Straight lines look the same no matter which direction you translate them (y=x+1 is the same line as y-1=x, which translates in words to “shifting y=x left by 1 looks the same as shifting it up by 1”), so it isn’t immediately obvious which direction you’re shifting the line in the example.

The rotations were the most interesting part, especially constructing the circles around the two halves of the trapezoid. It’s probably not a coincidence that this is the stage out of the three that takes up the biggest portion of the runtime; you do a lot more motivating here and guiding us through some logical steps, which helps hold our interest. (Though I suppose part of the time was you defining pi - with the audience’s math level you’re targeting, I’d expect nearly everyone to know what pi is so I don’t think you needed to go quite into that much detail.)

Finally - with such a big emphasis on being able to play around with it in Desmos, I’m surprised you didn’t leave a link to the result in description, but instead asked the audience if they wanted to see it. Engagement/comment bait on YouTube comes with the territory and I’m not faulting you for that, but for this video in particular, the whole (albeit unstated) conceit is that you’re making a playable thing in Desmos, so it feels particularly essential to your video to provide a link to it.

I found this video interesting but confusing. It was interesting to watch and think about how to create these shapes mathematically. But the topic is somewhat obscure, so I’m not sure how useful it would be for the average viewer. The creator does a reasonable job of keeping me engaged, but I never really got a sense of the big picture. Why are we interested in this topic? Is there something inherently useful about this? I think this is one of the biggest weaknesses of the video.

Some of your sound effects (which are cool, don’t get me wrong) are a bit loud compared to your voice. Otherwise, a good fun analysis.

The voiceover is a bit soft, but I really like the sound effects.

The picture at 5:29 is awesome and I wish you had spent more time on it. This is a microcosm of how I felt about this video. There’s a lot of ideas that you’re laying down, and you great job navigating them tightly so each one feels weighted appropriately to your goal, and yet a lot of them I found myself wanting a bit more depth. It’s hard for me to count this as a negative; just my personal preference. You’re clearly trying to induce excitement for younger viewers, and (while I’m not a younger viewer, so take this for it’s worth) I think you’re doing amazing.

My biggest complaint about this video is this sentence: “So I wanted to challenge myself— can I make it using math?”

This is the problem statement, but it’s neither defined well here (fine) nor clarified later (oh no). In particular, “using math” seems to mean “using Desmos”, and I thought “it” was going to be the equations defining the shapes based on how the video proceeds, but then as the scope expanded to your actual goal (which was… producing an interactive digitial version of tangrams in Desmos?) it left me quite confused about what we were doing. Only in the last minute when you said the “app” was available for us to try, did it finally click.

The animations were well done. However, the pacing of the video was too quick which muddled the goals/storyline of the video.

The chosen topic was interesting as it has an immediate visual appeal, however the video could have been more clear (and explained slower) about stating that the goal was to create a consistent system for generating these patterns in Desmos.

Topics from previous videos were thrown in: some extra context would have been useful.

Well, on the technicalities, I see your animation skills are strong. You should try to normalize the sound effect volume to your speech, it is much quieter than the whooshes, it was bothering me a bit.

The motivation wasn’t quite clear or great. Representing shapes like this can be neat but feels unnecessary. Graphics engines or anything else won’t do it like this, only desmos plotting. The initial pitch of tangram shapes made me wonder if you come up with a mathematical way of finding shapes or matching pictures with tangram blocks… so it was a bit of a letdown that this wasn’t the direction we’re moving.

Novelty: I haven’t seen this exact animation and geometric reasoning so I guess there’s novelty there.

Clarity: It wasn’t clear how the circles come into the picture (around 4:50). You quickly referred to an earlier video, at least the key idea should have been shown from there. You seem to be limiting yourself to moving all the points on one circle - and then run into a headache with the parallelogram. Whereas… the rotation pivot does not need to be in the exact center and polygon points don’t have to follow the exact same circle-path. I’ve worked on Manim videos and coded geometry so I might be biased towards vector math and rotation matrices… still, this limitation seems odd and arbitrary to me.

Memorability: I guess I’ll remember the animations, but not sure what I should remember about the content.

Very cool exploration, I didn’t even know desmos had all this machinery before I watched. The animation and sound are very obviously high effort as well, great video.