Summer of Math Exposition

A few too many jump cuts in the beginning for my liking. But the video itself was lovely! Will definitely show this to my comp sci students!

I quite like the concept of patterns. Nice job.

This is hard to judge because the video does not explain math concepts or even code; the game is about pattern recognition and the video is a “five-minute coding adventure” to create the game that explains what the code does but not how it was made. None of the patterns are described; it is not explained what a prime number, triangle number, prime factorization sequence, or even an upside-down number is. In that regard, this video will not help students understand patterns between numbers or how to find them. Perhaps the game should have been submitted as a non-video submission. In the first puzzle shown at about 0:40, 1 is on the board but not in the “perfect squares” category, despite being a perfect square. This is not ideal puzzle design because a player might notice the five perfect squares and try to guess which four are in the category, which in the worst case scenario would deplete all of their wrong guesses and lose them the game even though they correctly identified one of the patterns. In the test build, 1 is on the board but not in the “geometric series” category, and in the final showcase 8 is on the board but not in the “upside down numbers” category (which the player got wrong), 25 is not in the “arithmetic sequence: add 5” category, and 1 and 5 are not in the “Fibonacci sequence” category, which have the same problem. The problem with numbers being used twice, such as 11 for the first part of the game’s creation, was not addressed until much later, but it was addressed.

A custom “Connections” game maker already exists, and can be found at connections (dot) swellgarfo (dot) com. However, this project improves on the format by providing several categories and elements of each category so a different game is played each time instead of the puzzle creator having to make several links to different deterministic puzzles. This website is not mentioned in the video.

When listing examples of patterns in math at the beginning, 2 is not in the list of prime numbers.

I had no idea Desmos could do all that, that’s pretty impressive. It’s a fun little game! A lot of your explanations went a bit fast to catch all the details but that’s totally understandable given the complexity of the game, just knowing it’s possible opens up loads of possibilities. Really interesting process, thanks for making it.

This is absolutely amazing. This was really useful in showing me the kind of things you can use Desmos for which I didn’t know how to do, and also it was a really interesting watch. Everything was explained very clearly, and the choreography, sound quality, and all was very good. The idea and motivation was simple, relatable, and nice, and it’s clear that you’re a professional in what you do. The only thing I could say is getting some more in depth ideas about how you go about doing this kind of thing just in terms of what ideas you used to write some of the Desmos “code” would be nice, but that’d probably be done separately, because the video has a lot of value from keeping it simple and not going into large amounts of depth with the intricate details, so really I have no criticisms. How this has 300 views I have no idea. Mine has managed to get 16k and it’s the first video, but yours is significantly better, and I do truly hope that it gets the attention it really does deserve. This is an amazing video