Learning at Home: How to be a YouTuber

My son is 8, and he wants to be a famous YouTuber like DanTDM. Although I realize this aspiration may be short-lived, I’m open to the possibility. I also know that he probably won’t find this learning in the Ontario Curriculum.

So I decided I’d better figure out how this stuff works so that I can help him understand (and possibly realize) his dream.

I have a YouTube channel already. I post math and computer science videos, mostly, and a few more personal things. I don’t monetize the teaching videos since I direct my students to view them and that would be inappropriate. It was time to start a new channel.

I wanted a channel with a focus, but that was broad enough to allow for lots of content. The kids and I enjoy watching videos of booster box openings (Magic: The Gathering and Pokemon), and I watch more MTG videos. This is something I know a fair bit about, and I can produce content easily (if not always cheaply).

So Grasley Games was born. These aren’t games I’ve designed (that’s coming, though). Instead, “games” is a verb here.

I started by opening a box of Aether Revolt, the newest set of Magic: The Gathering available at the time. I practised for a while first, figuring out camera setup, microphone, lighting, and how to hold the cards effectively. I’ve done some video production work before, but I was still surprised at how challenging this initial planning was.

I also wanted to try some “actual plays”, recordings of playing games. I’ve recorded about 10 games, but only a few have been worth posting. Lots of camera problems with this stuff.

The channel is monetized, which means that some ad revenue accumulates over time. So far there’s $1.86 waiting for me. Another couple of lifetimes and I’ll pay for that box…

Now for the kids

This wasn’t just for me, remember? Both my kids want to participate too. Now that I’ve learned the basics of setting everything up, they’re starting to make videos for me to post. There are three so far on the channel:

What’s next

They keep asking to make more videos (I got enough stuff for them to make 6 videos each on these topics without any additional investment), so that’s pretty cool. I do want them to see how difficult it is to get eyes on your content when you’re in a fairly niche area, and that consistency is really important (they’re counting on me for this).

I’ve also made other spaces on the web for Grasley Games – we’ll see how these platforms pan out:

Grasley Games on WordPress

Grasley Games on Facebook

Grasley Games on Patreon

Grasley Games on Twitter

Speeding up video with ffmpeg

I keep having to Google this, so perhaps I’ll remember to look here.

To speed up a video with ffmpeg, use the decimal equivalent of 1/{speed multiple} with the following command line option. For example, for a video that you want to run at 8 times normal speed, use the value 1/8=0.125 in the command line

“C:\Program Files (x86)\WinFF\ffmpeg.exe” -i C:\Users\Brandon\Videos\videoIn
putFile.mov -an -filter:v “setpts=0.125*PTS” C:\Users\Brandon\Videos\videoOutput.mp4

This is video-only, which is what I typically want anyway. This is useful for time lapse video.

Using video to capture quadratic motion

In my MBF3C class today we observed quadratic motion and modelled it with http://www.desmos.com, and online graphing calculator. I’ve recreated the steps here (with some fake data).

First, I went to Desmos and projected a blank Cartesian coordinate system onto the screen at the front of the classroom.

Then, I found a black rubber stopper (I teach in a science classroom) a little more than an inch across.

I asked for two volunteers who would be willing to throw things at each other. That was easy.

They practiced lobbing the stopper back and forth to each other in front of the screen, trying to get the black rubber to crest visibly near the top of the grid. Eventually they were confident they could do it.
I held my iPhone in landscape orientation and recorded a slow-motion video. After a few attempts I felt we had a successful toss, and the students returned to their seats without injury.

We scrubbed through the video slowly and recorded the x– and y-coordinates for each major tick of the x-axis.

Then we plotted the points in Desmos (using the Table feature):

We then graphed a generic quadratic using the vertex form and its parameters (y=a(x-h)^2+k). Desmos provided the sliders for each parameter:

As a group the students decided to make a negative and small, to flatten the curve, then they adjusted h and k to fit:

Some interesting stuff to note about the process:

• Even using 120fps there were places near the edges of the curve for which it was hard to see the coordinates (blurring and gaps).
• The vertex wasn’t on the y-axis, which was surprising to the students.
• The glare of the projector made the grid a little hard to see.
• We had to have the lights out to make the grid visible at all on camera, and the dim lighting made the video a bit grainy.
• The parabola we fit to the data worked really, really well.

What’s next

I’m going to perform some more motion tasks with them to get more quadratic data, and we’re going to do some curve-fitting to model and predict things (for example, how far can you throw a ball off a 10th-story roof?).

I’d like to have a large, physical grid on the wall or something so that I can have the lights on when we record video.

I want students to record video and analyse it. Lots of them have iPhones, and I bet some of the other phones can take good, crisp video. If not, there’s some learning there too (about interpolation if nothing else).

I’ll try some other phenomena also.

A video you can use

Here’s another video we took, if you want to use it: