On the computer screen mathematician Eugenia Cheng reaches into an oven to find a tray full of steaming cookies– each one a little smaller than the next. Fast forward, and suddenly these cookies have formed a line across her table, from the biggest steaming cookie to the smallest. How does this relate to math? Cheng’s summer math series videos will tell you.

Over the summer, a series of five videos all starring Cheng were sent out to the Parker Community. Each video contained a lesson and activity that students, families, or faculty members could do over the summer months.

Out of the five videos, Cheng covered topics from infinity, sine waves, and shapes, to math games, and in each video Cheng taught a math topic and then provided activities for viewers to try at home. Most of the topics that were covered in the videos had some connection to Cheng’s March-Mathness Morning EXs last March.

In one video, Cheng explains infinity through baking cookies. In another, she explains sine waves through music and vocal sounds. Cheng even demonstrates the ways in which her enjoyment of ice cream can actually be graphed

Co-Chair of the Math department Sven Carlsson was one of the three faculty that helped organize the summer series, along with Lower and Intermediate School Coordinator of Studies Barbara Hunt, Co-Chair of the High School Math department Wendy Olt, and Assistant Principal Ruth Jurgensen. Last year, this math leadership team met to discuss how they could find ways to highlight all the math that takes place at Parker.

“So it was in the lens of how do we highlight all the great mathematicians in the student body and all the great work we’re doing,” Carlsson said. “Then at the same time we have this wonderful relationship with Professor Cheng developed.”

For Cheng, these videos were a way to show the school that math can be more than just what is taught in the classroom. “I wanted to say, ‘Hey look, math doesn’t have to just be about lots of multiplication and long division and equations, but can be about more interesting things,” Cheng said. “So I had the idea of making those videos.”

Working with Cheng to help bring the school together through math seemed like the perfect combination to the team. Carlsson said, “That seemed like a really good way to– because she’s so dynamic, have people thinking about it more, seeing it more, and loving it more.”

The question that the math leadership team kept in mind, Carlsson said, was, “How can we just get more people seeing the math that they’re doing everyday?”

Renee Jackson, a member of the Development Office at Parker, was in charge of organizing and facilitating the creation of the five videos. She made sure everything was where it needed to be, when it needed to be. “For a number of the takes, or shots that we got, we were using the school,” Jackson said. “And one of my priorities in producing these vides is ensuring that we’re not being interruptive of what the students are doing in their own space. Running out of time was always a bit of a challenge.”

Often times, what looked like a simple demo in one of Cheng’s videos was actually quite difficult to film. “At one point she was doing the ice cream demo, and I think it was part of the graph video where we were graphing her enjoyment of ice cream, and it happened to be really warm that day,” Jackson said. “I was like, ‘You’ve got to eat faster,’ otherwise we’re just going to be left with a soupy bowl of ice cream. With the number of takes that you do, you end up with doing things in a repetitive way. So she was like, ‘I don’t know if I can have anymore ice cream.’”

Another challenge the summer math series faced was how the project could be accessible to students anywhere from age five to age eighteen. Jackson, who has a son currently in the JK class at Parker, was actually able to watch Cheng’s videos with her son over the summer. “I was able to take some of the things we did on set and that were presented in the video and do them with him, which was awesome,” Jackson said. “There’s a part of me that wished I had a math teacher with that kind of animation and energy teaching me when I was in school.”

Whether it was a dodecahedron, creating a mobius tortilla, or trying a sine wave demo, there were endless possibilities for exploring math beyond the videos. “When he see’s a 12 sided or 20 sided shape, he can identify it now, which is kind of cool,” Jackson said. “It was hands-on fun, and my son didn’t even realize I was trying to teach him something!”

Cheng’s approach, according to Jackson, is a key to her success. “I think what was so interesting is she takes a complex concept, or what can be a complex concept, like the sine wave, or your basic understanding of shapes,” Jackson said, “and she adds layers to it.”

More often than not, being there for the film production with Cheng was an entertaining experience. “She’s a character and a half,” Jackson said. “She is very high energy, she’s brilliant, she’s whimsical, and so there’s an element of all that in the way that she presents her work.”

In the future, Cheng hopes that she will be able to collaborate more with the school and the math department. “I feel that too much math education today is not doing that well because people get put off from that,” Cheng said. “Having teachers who really want to teach in a way that involves discovery, creativity, invention, and lots of trial and error, and projects, and less check-results curriculum, I think it’s amazing that you have teachers that can do that. I would love to carry on developing ideas, trying out projects, and doing things a bit unusual, I really believe in that.”

To access Parker’s Vimeo account and Cheng’s videos, press this link: https://vimeo.com/fwparker