Prof. Christian Spannagel on Twitch: Teaching math as interactively as possible

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Christian Spannagel is a professor of mathematics and its didactics with a focus on computer science and the implementation of new media at the Heidelberg University of Education. He regularly streams his events on Twitch, where he has built up a second audience for his subject. In this interview, he reveals what motivates him, what he learns from gaming streams and how he manages the balancing act between face-to-face events and the online community.

MIT Technology Review: I became aware of you through a post on Mastodon. It was an announcement about a lecture on set theory that was about to start, which you were streaming live on Twitch. I know Twitch primarily for gaming. I found a math lecture on Twitch unusual. How did you come up with the idea of streaming your lectures?

Christian Spannagel: I wanted to offer my lectures as a livestream for various reasons. On the one hand, I wanted to enable students to participate in my lectures in a hybrid way. And secondly, I've had a relatively well-running YouTube channel for mathematics for years, where people can watch YouTube math videos asynchronously. But this YouTube mode is not interactive enough for me. Of course, people can comment under the video, but I actually want to develop mathematics together with people and that's why I try to appeal not only to my own students, but also to people from outside the university who are interested in mathematics and would like to get a taste of it and join in.

Why did you decide to use Twitch? You can also set up live streams on YouTube.

Sure, but I thought about which platform is THE platform for streaming, the prototype so to speak. In the end, I decided on Twitch because I think the community functionalities are better developed there. I also have the impression that a Twitch stream attracts the attention of more people who don't already follow you. On Twitch, you are simply integrated into this universe and can benefit from the network that already exists there in the streaming sector. But I'm not the first person to do this for university teaching. There are also colleagues, like Mathias Magdowski, who was on Twitch before me and streams on the subject of electrical engineering.

Did you have any previous private experience with Twitch?

No. I only knew Twitch from hearsay and really had to familiarize myself with it. So I looked at gamers on Twitch and realized that they often have a Discord community to accompany their streams. This makes it possible to continue to serve a community in the time between streams, keep it alive and offer an exchange. That's when I thought: Okay, you need that too. This realization was really valuable. So I set up a Discord server for mathematics and computer science at – and it's going really well. There are now over 1,400 members who exchange information about math problems, help and support each other every day.

"The streams and the Discord community complement each other wonderfully"

In principle, you create a second public sphere via the streams and the Discord community.

Exactly. And one that arises more or less synchronously. The streams and the Discord community complement each other wonderfully. The YouTube videos on my channel, on the other hand, are a collection of videos that you can watch afterwards if you're looking for something specific.

With the streamed lectures: Can you do justice to both groups of participants, those attending live on site and those watching virtually?

In the face-to-face event, the focus is of course on the participants who are on site. But I also try to involve the online participants. I regularly check the chat to see if there are any questions. Sometimes participants answer the questions themselves in the chat. Sometimes I pick up something from the chat and bring it into the lecture hall so that the students can also answer on the spot and thus create an exchange.

How do you manage the balancing act between giving lectures and keeping an eye on the chat?

I can't keep an eye on the chat all the time. It's not possible in this situation. However, I have two student assistants who are connected, one of whom moderates the chat and another who looks after the content. She knows the course content, answers questions or collects questions and summarizes them for me and writes them in the chat.

One event, two publics

Do you stream every one of your lectures?

No, not every one of my events, but only those where the streams also offer added value for external people, such as my inverted classroom events. In these events, the students prepare for the classroom event in advance with appropriate tasks and materials. In the lecture hall, we then try to work on new tasks together, both in small groups and as a whole group. And it is precisely this alternation between group work and frontal phase that can be implemented well with the help of Discord and Twitch: Online participants can, for example, meet for group work in Discord channels and then take part in the joint discussion of the results in the Twitch stream.

What do you hope to gain from making your lessons available to a wider audience?

It's an act of science communication, so to speak. Thanks to the many comments I've received on YouTube over the years, I now have a feel for who out there in society is interested in mathematics. These are many people who often had a bad experience with math at school, but who still find it exciting. Others also have a real fear of math, or they think that their brains are not made for math. But of course that's not true, and that's a real shame!

People also have a somewhat limited view of mathematics, which they may have picked up at school. I would like to contribute to improving the image of mathematics in society. On the one hand, this means that people develop an understanding of mathematics as a science of patterns and structures, but also that they build up an adequate image of themselves in relation to mathematics by realizing that they are not so bad at mathematics after all: 'I'm not so bad at math after all, I understand it.

"There is a positive attitude towards innovative didactic concepts here"

How do your colleagues react to your streaming work? Do they ask you for advice because they want to do the same for their courses? Or are there also critical voices?

Neither. There is positive interest in what I do. However, they often don't want to implement it because they often have other work priorities. But there is no criticism in the sense of "What nonsense are you doing?". At the teacher training college where I work, it's perhaps a different setting than at a university. Here, the focus is on mathematics didactics rather than mathematics. That's why there is a fundamentally positive attitude towards innovative didactic and methodological concepts, including science communication activities.

This article first appeared on t3n.de .

(mki)