Here’s the formula for how a Purdue prof gained nearly 43K followers on YouTube

YouTube channel helps high school, college students with various science, engineering questions

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — Electric guitars and science. Supersonic ping pong balls. If you’re looking for online content to pass the time, you can see why thousands are following a Purdue University engineer who posts fun experiments and explains the science behind “I wonder why ...?” questions.

Mechanical engineering technology professor Mark French runs a popular YouTube channel called PurdueMET. He’s making science fun in appealing content for students all over the world.

A sampling of his 300-plus videos:

* Why cranes tip over.

* The supersonic ping pong ball gun. Don’t worry, it starts with a warning, “Don’t try this at home.”

* Why you can’t use earbuds to listen to your electric guitar.

* Measuring the strength of a guitar string.

* Applied optimization series, including method of steepest descent in MATLAB.

* Three bar truss homework problem, which features a thumbnail photo of his kitten, Gumbo.

The channel also is a resource for high school and college students who need help with engineering, physics and math topics as they study online. Helping students is how French got started.

A quick video of French’s teaching antics is available at https://purdue.university/3eiDnSY.

This Purdue Polytechnic Institute professor, who also teaches a guitar-building class, originally created the YouTube channel to help his own engineering students solve difficult problems. More than 10 years ago, French recorded a sample structures problem on the whiteboard in his office for his undergraduate class. Before too long, that video had 500 views. There were only 72 students in his class and he knew there was no way they had watched it that many times. The first comment he got came from a viewer in Austria, and French discovered this video would not just be useful for his students but for students everywhere.

French has covered topics ranging from applied optimization problems to the technical computer language MATLAB to biplane engineering and dynamics and the mathematics of music. On the entertaining side, he uses liquid nitrogen and packing peanuts to show the science behind gas expanding through evaporation and his work with students building a supersonic pingpong gun that can shoot a ball through a paddle was even featured on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.”

In the decade since the YouTube channel’s inception, French has filmed 370 videos, garnering more than 7 million views and 42,900 subscribers. The most recent videos are named “Brain Waves.” He releases videos on a varying schedule.

Last week, he made and released five Brain Waves videos:

• Early Jet Engines and Aircraft
• Specific Impulse – Easy Way to Understand Jets and Rockets
• Statics – Forces in 3D
• Statics – Components of 3D Force Vectors
• Statics – Shear and Moment in Beams

“When I’m on a roll,” he said. “I can film one or two a day.”

Video topics are frequently things he thinks his own students might find useful. Sometimes he gets requests from his students, from other classes or from YouTube’s comment section. When he sees that a topic will meet a need, he shoots a video and sends the link to his class.

French’s videos have hits from almost every country in the world. He has them from such remote locales as Svalbard and Jan Mayen, Arctic islands under the jurisdiction of Norway. In the last year, his largest number of hits has come from India. The United Sates is second, followed by the U.K., Canada, the Philippines, Australia, South Africa, Pakistan, Germany, Turkey, Malaysia and Indonesia. Brain Waves has helped French affect the world “beyond boundaries of Purdue,” he said.

“I want to work in service to my students wherever they are,” French said. “The fact that I can do that is really rewarding.”

Now that classes have moved online for this semester, his videos may find another new audience still. Most of French’s videos are for engineering and engineering technology students, those interested in statics or dynamics in physics, MATLAB, or Mathcad.

French tries to make the kinds of things he needed as a student. “This would have helped me a lot,” he said. “I spend a lot of time going over why we’re doing this and why it matters.”

He added that if other people want to try to do this, the videos are easy to make. French records by putting his video camera on a shelf pointing at his board. “The barrier to entry is very low,” he said. “It’s a great way to reach students everywhere. With intros and outros and Purdue logos, it’s a way to get Purdue more visibility around the world.”

Writer: Kelsey Schnieders Lefever, kschnied@purdue.edu

Media contact: Brian Huchel, bhuchel@purdue.edu

Source: Mark French, guitar@purdue.edu

 

Note to Journalists: Photos, a video and video stills of Mark French are available on Google Drive. His YouTube channel is called PurdueMET