I’ve learned quite a lot about habits these past weeks. The Power of Habit taught me about the anatomy of habits and discussed how it can alleviate the need for willpower. As well, it touched on the anatomy of willpower and how one can do more with less. I intend to apply this new information in the classroom in the future, but for now, I will apply this knowledge by endeavoring to learn something that I always considered vastly beyond me. For a while now, I’ve been wanting to learn how to animate for the purpose of math instruction. I’ve always appreciated educational YouTube channels such as Crash Course and 3blue1brown, and recently I’ve wanted to design animations for lower-level math students. In high school, I struggled through my courses, but I discovered helpful YouTube resources in college that helped restore my confidence. I want to be able to design math courses for middle and high school math lessons that would help people with different learning abilities like myself.

I made the discovery that the man behind 3blue1brown, Grant Sanderson, has made his own Python library called Manim and made it open source. From there, a community evolved around it they formed another library called ManimCE. It seems that, to design these animations, I will need to learn to code. This is a daunting prospect for me, as I’ve tried learning code before. I struggled greatly, but I hope that my newfound knowledge of habits and willpower will enable me to succeed in this effort. I spent several hours over the last week just setting up Visual Studio and the dependencies required for the Manim library. During this timeframe, I used a technique I learned about in Power of Habit that extends my willpower. When I sat down and opened up the programs, I instantly rewarded myself with a treat I enjoy, in this case, a chocolate-covered coffee bean. This helped to reduce the friction of starting. Furthermore, I rewarded myself for every 15-30 minutes spent on the task, or upon achieving a milestone. The content of my work was quite dry, and the resources online were highly technical and hard to follow. I feel that this technique helped me profoundly, and I’m pleased to say that I got everything set up and I ran my first animation.

Now the work begins

Now I need to actually learn how to use Python and familiarize myself with the ManimCE library. To the right is the test code that was posted by the ManimCE community. I played around with it a bit, but I have sooo much to learn. Luckily, I have a good friend who is also in school for education, and he is interested in learning this animation program with me. We intend to spend much of December on this project, and I am looking forward to having another layer of motivation to develop the difficult skill that is coding.