I do remember most of the maths I learned at school, but I’m not a mathematician, so why did my mathematician friend come to me for help with her video project?
Although the topic was maths, the task was not really about maths. It was essentially an editorial task.
Tessa Tulloch, my mathematical friend, taught maths to adults for years. She had made dozens of short videos explaining simple calculations – adding, multiplying, using decimals etc – and encouraged her students to look at them on their own to remind themselves of the basics.
After her courses were dropped by the further education college, the videos sat, metaphorically speaking, in a drawer, unused. She asked me to help her get them online, where they might be useful.
It was an editorial task, because the way to get them to a potential audience was by organising the videos into a logical order to make it easy for the audience to find what they wanted, and describing the content in each one briefly and clearly.
The videos are organised in order of difficulty, starting with why we put numbers in columns. That is how eight of them appear on her website, cantremembermaths.com, with links to her YouTube channel.
On the YouTube channel, users may then choose a playlist showing each of the eight topics, starting with why numbers are in columns and ending with decimals. Or they may go deeper into a particular topic such as multiplication or division.
So the task broke down into:
• decide on the audience. People who can’t remember maths, obviously, though some may lack the confidence to admit it. A secondary target would therefore be teachers, tutors, parents or employers who can identify someone struggling and steer them towards help.
• organise the content. In this case, start with the most basic ideas about maths and build up to the more complicated concepts and calculations, such as ratios and percentages. Then put four or five videos on one topic together into one playlist so that users can focus on one topic at a time.
• write the text. This is the skill of summarising so that users know what to expect at every point on the website or YouTube channel, and don’t waste time on the information they’re not interested in.
I hope you or someone you know may find the videos useful.
Here’s the website again:
cantremembermaths.com
And the YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@cantremembermaths