Video construction

A well known online education company is holding a video competition for creation of education videos. Initially I didn't think it was really worth the effort to enter, but I have reconsidered - it would be a good exercise of my skills, a good opportunity to improve and learn a lot about information format.

I have made videos before - my last one was notably an origami tutorial that got ok feedback from other people. But I watched the video again, and I realised there is so, so much room to improve. I'm not the same person that I was before. I don't have a lid on my heart anymore (did I ever have one?) - I'm so much better at getting criticised. Being criticised is the fastest way to the top, and I won't be fully satisfied unless I am battling it out with the very best at the very peak of the mountain. Or the tree, in this case. I'm meant to be a tree climber?




I'm rewatching the origami tutorial I made so long ago, and it really annoys me how unclear the tutorial is. For a long time now, I've had plans to remake the video into something a lot better, but I've never had the motivation to.

But now I'm thinking, remaking this would be a good first step to making the video entry for the video competition as good as possible. Ideally I want the video entry to the competition to be as good as possible, so I suppose I can consider the video an intermediary 'sacrificial' step - a lower-quality production that will help me get back into videomaking.

One thing I do want to maintain is the current popularity of the videos and the subscriber count though - a newly released video is much harder to get views for than a well-established video with lots of thumbs-up and views. Therefore my plan will be to provide redirects from all the old videos to the new HQ video, as best as I can. I'll try to do it in one part - my account is verified, so I can upload videos longer than 15 minutes.

Unfortunately, I'm still recovering from getting a wisdom tooth taken out, so it'll be awhile before I can talk as well as I used to be able to. But there's lots of work to be done - recording, planning, etc.

After I finish the origami tutorial, I'll review it, think about it a bit more, and get started on the video competition.

As to topic, computer science is quite obviously the best choice here. I've had two years of solid experience improving my teaching in computer science and am fairly confident that I can deliver a solid video.

While I think my maths and science explanations would be fairly strong given enough planning, I think there will be much less competition in the computer science sector, which will make my video stand out more. Which reminds me - I need to think of ways to help make my video stand out among the remaining videos. Some cool trick or technique is suitable here.

I did identify seven goals at the start of the semester that I wanted to stick to for my students, but this project is entirely for myself - my goal this time is simply absolute victory. The highest priority is now not to effectively educate the students, but to thoroughly impress the judges.

I'm thinking of trying to explain time complexity and binary search. The more complex the topic, the more impressive the result it when explained effectively. Binary search, as a concept, is actually not very complex at all - it's just the optimal strategy to the higher-lower game. But tying it into mathematical concepts of time complexity - I think that is something I will excel at.

Graphing tools will be superbly useful here. I recall my friend recommending a tool called GeoGebra as a useful demonstrative tool for graphing - I feel as if that will be useful for visualising time complexity, but perhaps I will have to come up with something better.

I'm pretty keen. Here we go!