audio and video are both quite clear (video is better than the sfft videos but this may just because you are closer to the camera or mic or whatever you are using)
i have a brother turning 9 soon, i think i'll show this to him

Quote of the year.

The audio and video are very well done. It must be my internet/computer, since on IE it lags a bit and stops every now and then. On Mozilla it re-starts randomly when I'm watching the video.

How many takes did that take?

More than one

So if I go to IMO, I am the sexiest man alive?

I look forward to high school.

This brought a smile to my face.

Ana - believe it or not (I know it's tough to believe when you're just coming out of middle school), it does kinda work that way. As you get older, being good at math/cs/etc gets more and more attractive, mainly, I think, because it's a safe bet that such people will have interesting lives and be interesting people. The stuff that passes for interesting in most middle schools seems decidedly pathetic by the time you leave college. Yeah, I'm sure you hear this all the time. Doesn't make it any less true.

rofl

see richard the problem here is that the math's directed at bright 9-year-olds, but the humor... oh man yeah it's probably aimed at people twice that age

but um on another note i think your last post had me wrestling with an interesting question, which is how to explain the phenomenon you described. i'm not sure whether it's a new approach taken by math "nerds" to society as they mature that seems to reflect on them in a more positive light, if only because they capitulate a little to some standard norms they'd otherwise want nothing to do with, or if it's a rather recent thing, sparked by what david brooks might call the "rise of the geek culture" that essentially involves a pop culture embrace of math guys because yeah well without us these days the global economy would kind of like cease to exist. i'd surmise it's most likely a little of both, but yeah the point is there are two ways of looking at this, which aren't entirely mutually incompatible, and i'd guess the key is that as culture trends intellectual (not only generation-wise, with the rise of the information era, but also just as kids stop caring about baseball once they realize they can't break Hank Aaron's record--or is it barry bonds's now?), math kids trend mainstream--or at the very least self-identify with the mainstream. but yeah i could just be making all of this up, but the point, which probably got a bit obscured, is that the self-identification business is pretty powerful, but in retrospect i believe it is totally possible for a math "nerd" to be socially accepted by her peers--the question is how much does she want to? and as she gets older, she'll want to more, and her peers will most likely all of a sudden discover how cool she is. also dude the feminine pronoun use there didn't aid clarity much i bet but oh well

good seeing you at MOP, and congratulations on your work with those teachers--i think you're on the edge of a breakthrough, when the trickle of interest from the NCTM types will turn to a torrent

and oh yeah i'm sure you enjoyed how palmer was able to post the MOP rankings straight from AoPS usernames--you've pretty much permeated the entire U.S. math olympiad community--i was pretty impressed.

>> So if I go to IMO, I am the sexiest man alive?

--> proof by example

I was being glib when I said 9 years old -- I expect most of the students who will be looking at the Intro Counting vids to be in the 11-13 age range. They'll certainly grok the humor. And don't sell the 9 year-olds short; they're certainly attuned to the moronic values of middle school, too.

On my computer, I'm unable to rewind or jump ahead in the video. I don't know if that's just me, but it would be a nice feature for people who miss a part and need to see it again, or who know what you're talking about and want to skip ahead. The picture quality is much better than it was in the previous videos.

You should be able to rewind and jump ahead once the whole video loads (at least that's how it works on my computer -- it streams with no user control until the whole thing loads). It's a big file (50+MB), so it won't load instantly. Let me know if that's not the problem.

(I do hope to add some intra-video navigation as well, but I'm still researching how that might work.)

hahahaha very entertaining

I always like how you include your general strategies, they are very helpful!

I think audio and video are very good. And explanation too.

PS: I am twelve years old.

I watched this with my two very good-looking sons, a 6-year-old who only knows a little math and an 11-year-old who knows quite a lot of math for his age. The audio was great. The video was very slightly jumpy at first but smoothed out after a minute or two (on IE with a Verizon broadband connection).

Don't underestimate little kids. The humor was not at all lost on the six-year-old, who is a bit vain and may need a little external motivation to spur his interest in math. He's mainly into in dinosaurs, and he plans to be an artist. He watched the whole video and claimed to understand it -- he may be drawing Venn diagrams of dinosaurs before the day is over.

blue morpho

And if you get to be a coordinator you're even better off

Pedagogically, the problem seemed well motivated and well explained.

Technologically, the only major problem I observed was a lag between the audio and video during the presentation's first minute or two.

Aesthetically, I'd use a simpler font and not have so much persistent text above and below the main video field. For example, it's probably redundant to have "Art of Problem Solving" and http://www.artofproblemsolving.com appear persistently throughout the video. You might use only the latter, and display it only during the initial and terminal fifteen seconds of the video.

I'm guessing the lag is just an issue of the video still downloading while watching. If you re-watched it, was the lag still there at the beginning the second time around?