The book is full of interesting stories.
The book is brimming with captivating tales. all nice product that comes out of it
I’ve got that wand lust and I’m gonna walk the scene. We’ll get back to this buddy at the end of the video, but before that I want to tell you about the Summer of Math Exposition Number Two.
Last year, we did the Summer of Math Exposition Number One, which was essentially an open invitation for people to make explanatory math content that they might have thought about making before, but just get an excuse for us to all do it at the same time and together. The way we did it is we framed it as a contest, so we had different participants - a lot of them were videos, not all of them were videos - and we had a process for selecting winners.
Aside from the competition aspect of it - which is really just an excuse to have a deadline and have that little extra push to try to make something as good as you can - the most exciting part was just how many really solid pieces of content came out of that. In fact, I was curious the other day and I went to look at the analytics and just looking at the video content, mainly because that’s where it’s easiest to count, the total number of hits on it of all of the video submissions to the first Summer of Math Exposition - if we count up all the views that they accumulated, it’s over 15 million total views there.
We want to do it again - if you have some kind of math explainer that you’ve been thinking about making and posting online in some capacity, whatever that is, and if you want to use this summer as an excuse to make it happen, there are really just three main bits of logistics.
Subscribe to the official mailing list that we’re going to use for it - all of the official communication about things like timelines, rules for submissions, answers to any questions that people might have had - all of it’s gonna live there.
The submission deadline is August 15th, so try to finish whatever you’re making maybe five days before that, because we have to be immovable with some kind of line and August 15th is going to be that line.
If you want to engage with other people who are also participating in the event - maybe share some of your work or get some feedback or just chat about math in general - there’s a Discord for it and last year the Discord was really the lifeblood of the whole event. I mean, we had the announcement, we had the choosing of the winners, but all of the real community components of it happened on that Discord in between.
But with this year, I also wanted to add one tiny little twist to the whole event. I’ve always thought it might be nice to somehow play matchmaker between domain experts - people like mathematicians or professors of other kinds, or teachers or professionals - the people who have the know-how and the experience with respect to some technical topic, they know the best stories to tell - but maybe they don’t have the time to actually put together a video, or they don’t have the video-making skills and content creation skills - and then pair them together with content producers, whether that’s people who are really interested in making videos, video editing, animation, or maybe web developers interested in interactive blog posts, game developers, artists - whatever the form of content creation might be.
Because if you limit your scope to the world of online educational content creation by individuals, you have to live in this little intersection here between the people who have good lessons to teach and then the people who have the time and the interest and then the technical know-how to put together that content, but with well-organized collaboration, you can get a lot of good content out of the union of those two sets, rather than just the intersection.
I think a shining example of this would be the entire Channel Number File, where you’ve got Brady who’s a very talented journalist and interviewer and film creator, videographer, and he goes and interviews the various experts out there. A lot of the experts wouldn’t be making their own videos, but by pairing together with Brady, they get a really nice product that comes out of it.