I don't envy the contestants. I think 1,200 entries is so many that the organizers can't even glance at most of them; there had to be a peer review process.
There were 5 winners. Your odds of winning were less than half a percent.
When submitting to a contest, you have no idea how many submissions there will be. With this many, and the processes around it, your submission WILL most likely be lost in the noise.
Indeed, many, many very good submissions will be lost in the noise.
At the same time, these kinds of videos take obscene amounts of time to prepare.
It's depressing to throw weeks of your heart and soul into something, only to have no one look at it.
... not, the primary motivation is to help people and to share content. 3B1B might give a very tall soapbox.
If you spend this much time, for three dozen views (which is not uncommon for videos further down -- and a view doesn't necessarily mean a person watched it all the way through), you've probably wasted a lot of time.
I don't know what the solution here is, and I'm not faulting anyone (I don't think anyone expected 1200 submissions), but the amount of dissipated effort makes me sad.
I almost made an explainer for the contest, and I'm glad I didn't. I think I would have made a good one, but I think for the expected number of views, I'm better off tutoring people 1:1.
A few days ago I was trying to understand the State Monad in Haskell because the book I was reading didn't explain it well. So I Googled it and the the first couple of links also didn't satisfy, including the Haskell wiki book that many articles link to. However further down the search results list I found an blog post that seamed like somebody had written directly to what was confusing me. The author had obviously put a bunch of effort into making a clear and understandable exposition. I was so impressed by the article that I had to write to the author letting them know how much I appreciated the effort they had put into the article. But when I looked at the blog post date it was from 2012!! Which in internet time seems like ages ago!
My point with this long winded reply is that I think the primary motivation should be to help people. Obviously if you're spending a whole lot of effort to make an explainer for the contest and Grant changes the format next year then there is little utility to that effort. But for these contestants and their submissions I plan to bookmark this page and this will be my daily breakfast viewing for many days to come! (I was so excited to see such a long list of submissions for my consumption!)
I think the effort people put into their submissions over time will be significantly greater (if not absolutely greater) than what 1:1 tutoring might achieve.
3B1B said at the beginning (and emphasises is the results video) that the purpose of the "contest" was not to win, but just to give that little nudge to more people who were thinking about making math explainers to start.
According to his website, there was a peer review process. As Grant states, to be eligible for the final review, each entrant needed to contribute one hour to the review process.
As part of developing his Youtube channel, he has written and open-sourced manim, a library for programatically generating animations written in Python: https://github.com/ManimCommunity/manim/.
And for anyone wondering where the name 3blue1brown comes from: Grant Sanderson has a condition called heterochromia, his right eye is 3 parts blue, and 1 part brown, like his logo.
I wonder how this is resolved for places that ask for eye color (various people identification registries). If the information could be accurate and understandable (from a short database column entry), it's a quite unique identifier.
Heterochromia of the eye is called heterochromia iridum or heterochromia iridis. It can be complete or sectoral. In complete heterochromia, one iris is a different color from the other. In sectoral heterochromia, part of one iris is a different color from its remainder. In central heterochromia, there is a ring around the pupil or possibly spikes of different colors radiating from the pupil.
So, in case of Grant Sanderson, it would be sectoral heterochromia.
He also has started a podcast this year. In each episode he discusses mainly math and education related topics with different people. I have liked it quite much.
Probably not. The idea was to encourage "nobodies" to create math teaching material. People who thought they might want to do that, but never got started.
The exposition contest was designed to give them a little push and get eyeballs on their content, so they've got an actual chance to be noticed, no matter if they win.
An established YouTuber entering it would have taken attention away from those new people.
Per the contest announcement [0], the intent was "[...] to encourage people who've never put stuff online before" and "[...] to offer a little bit of activation energy to anyone who has thought about doing something like this, but just never got around to it".
So the spirit of the contest excludes those YouTubers.
Probably "The Beauty of Bézier Curves" [1], one of the choices by 3B1B, comes closest. It is already a relatively large channel although usually focused on game dev tutorials rather than math explanations. This video bridges those two areas and is absolutely beautiful.
Interesting--I recognized that animation style immediately, because she's also the creator of a Unity asset library called Shapes[1], (a "...real-time vector graphics library with high-quality line drawing and infinite resolution shapes, rendered with advanced anti-aliasing techniques"),
which seems to have been used to create the video.
Thank you to all the volunteers for setting this up, mathematics and education is a better place today than it was yesterday because of you.
Much of this competition was coordinated by Dr. James Schloss, thank you. Check out his YouTube channel, https://youtu.be/EbanExb75mc