Speaking for myself, visuals are often critical when it comes to achieving understanding. I struggled greatly in maths and chemistry until I found resources on YouTube that had well-presented visuals. A couple examples of outstanding channels with a focus on visual aid for learning are Khan Academy and NancyPi.
Of course, the quality of visual aid is important, and the highest quality visual aid is almost always animation. My absolute favorite YouTube channel that carried my hand through chemistry is Crash Course. They use animations to wonderful effect, showing the movement of molecules and electrons in an effort to guide the viewer to visualize the process accurately. Crash Course has a range of content in the hard sciences as well as the soft sciences like psychology and history. Below is a video that shows many effective animations, and I would argue that his lesson would be much less effective if the animations were not present.
Now on to myself. I desperately want there to be a channel that takes these wonderful animations and incorporates them into math lessons. Unfortunately, the channels above like Khan Academy and NancyPi don’t use animations to the same degree. Though some math channels use animations, like Numberphile and my all-time favorite 3blue1brown, they do not often address basic math concepts for the grade range 7-12. I would love to learn how to animate in a similar way so that I can present an animation while giving a lecture on the topic. Below is a video of a slideshow I created using Canva.
After playing around a little with Canva, I’ve come to the conclusion that this platform isn’t quite right for the purposes I have in mind. Though I was able to roughly get my idea across, I would really like to be able to animate the movement of numbers and functions with precision, such that I can take on more complicated topics like pre-calc. Specifically, I can imagine a powerful animation that would show sinusoidal functions and how the parameters of the functions affect the results on a graph. It’s a difficult thing to communicate on a whiteboard alone, and I believe a stronger visual aid would go far in teaching the unintuitive concept, especially to struggling students.
Animation is a rich opportunity for education, not to mention the unfathomable potential of virtual reality and the possibility of 3-dimensional animations. I hope to find a suitable platform soon, where I can begin designing lessons that could supplement my efforts in tutoring.
Hi Jake,
I agree that animation and visuals are an amazing tool for education. Visuals have helped me deepen my comprehension of many topics and subjects throughout school. I would even say that Youtube channels like the ones you’ve mentioned have been essential for my learning and understanding! I really like your example of using Canva to teach a concept, and I think you did a great job despite the lack of in-depth animation and precision possible through the platform. It would truly be a gift to your students if you were able to utilize more advanced animation in your lessons.
– Sarah