Last week I kicked off a new series on the Coding Math Channel. It’s the Application series.
I was thinking that it’s nice to present new concepts in each video, but there is a limited amount that I can do with them. I try to make the main episodes be 10-15 minutes long. I can explain a concept, do a few drawings, show some math, write some code, see it in action, and maybe iterate on that once or twice. And then, that’s it for that topic. Hopefully the brief example was good enough, because I’m moving on to something else now.
So my thought was to start another series where I actually build some simple app or game, or at least the barest outline of such. With some real world applications of the principles that are covered in the other videos. Each video will be in the five minute range, adding just one or two small features to the current app or game. Each feature may make use of one or more of the concepts from the other videos.
The first game is something I call Ballistics. It’s just a simple idea where you aim a gun and it shoots a cannonball that you try to hit a target. Like the old QBasic game, Gorillas.
In the first episode, we use a bit of trigonometry, including arctangent, to aim the gun using the mouse. In this week’s upcoming episode, we’ll actually get a cannonball firing, so that will use the particle class, with velocity and gravity, and lots more real world application of trigonometry. But each one is a bite sized piece of an application. We might hit the same concept over and over in different parts of the same app, or in different apps. But that’s the whole idea, to see many different ways you can use these concepts.
So now, we have the main episode each Monday, a Mini episode – shorter 5-minute simple concept – on Wednesday, and these Application episodes on Friday.
I want to thank all of you who have supported me on Patreon.com. It really makes doing these videos more justifiable in terms of the time I spend on them. And if you are a supporter, know that only the main Monday episodes are Patreon sponsored episodes. The Minis and Applications are on the house.