Storytelling, Teaching, and Mathematics

This short list of “Pixar Story Rules” from Pixar story artist Emma Coats offers a fun look into the mind of a story-teller, as well as a surprising source of mathematical problem-solving and teaching advice!

These particular story rules sound remarkably similar to techniques of mathematical exploration.

#7   Come up with your ending before you figure out your middle.

#9   When you’re stuck, make a list of what WOULDN’T happen next.

#10   Pull apart the stories you like.

#11   Putting it on paper lets you start fixing it.

#20   Exercise:  take the building blocks of a movie you dislike.  How would you rearrange them into what you DO like?

Working backwards, proof by contradiction, taking apart things you understand and trying to put them back together, getting your hands dirty by working out the details–these are all common and useful techniques in exploring and understanding mathematical ideas.

And as a friend pointed out, writing a story is indeed a kind of problem-solving; maybe it’s not so surprising how much that process shares in common with mathematics.

And as a teacher, the following two really resonate, for obvious reasons!

#2   You gotta keep in mind what’s interesting to you as an audience, not what’s fun to do as a writer.  They can be very different.

#1   You admire a character for trying more than for their successes.

Averia: The Average Font

This is a clever and interesting idea:  creating a new font by taking the average of all existing fonts.

http://iotic.com/averia/

By overlaying all the small letter a‘s, say, from all the different fonts, one can take a visual average and create a new letter a.  Repeat for the whole alphabet, numerals, and punctuation marks, and voila!, you’ve got Averia.

The idea of taking a visual average may be a bit mysterious, but the author describes a few different approaches in how to combine the images.  Essentially all of the instances of a particular symbol are placed on top of each other, and the the darkest parts of the new image are where the instances intersect the most.  The result is then smoothed over to create a readable letter.

And the font looks pretty nice, if not too exciting.  Just what you might expect from the average font.

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