Westerville mom and former fourth-grade teacher, Caroline Farkas, no longer teaches a single classroom of students. Instead, she teaches students in more than 100 countries through her math-education content-creating business: Doodles & Digits.
“I had a student, I remember him telling me that he wanted to be a YouTube star, and I vividly remember thinking in my head, ‘That’s not a real career, you can’t actually make money doing that,” Farkas says.
Ironically, uploading videos on YouTube is now Farkas’ full-time career, and the success of her videos led to her TV show titled “How it’s Math,” now airing on PBS stations across the nation.
“I have a little note [that student] wrote me, it’s in a frame that I keep on my desk when I’m editing because I actually think about him a lot, I’m like, ‘You know what? he was right, and this is what I’m doing now,” she says.
Artfully educating
Choosing a career path, Farkas was torn between pursuing digital art and early childhood education.
While she ultimately decided to pursue education, Farkas initially despised math before realizing she could use real-life examples and her love of digital art by creating fun animation as learning materials.
“I used to draw cartoon scenes on the chalkboards for students …I’ve always drawn my own visuals, my clip art and stuff like that,” Farkas says. “When students see math, they are seeing numbers, but they’re not just having to look at numbers, they can look at a fraction donut…When we’re talking about arrays and multiplication, they can look at a tray of cookies.”
Having been one herself, Farkas knows that most teachers don’t have time to create their own graphics to spruce up their lessons. Because of this, she makes her digital graphics accessible to all educators.
“I even have teachers from other countries using my clip art in their materials so there might be a whole German math worksheet with my fractions on it,” she says. “I went into the profession wanting to make a positive difference for students and kids, and so it’s showing that the impact has been larger than I could have even ever imagined.”
Camera ready
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Farkas searched for engaging math education videos for students learning remotely. When she couldn’t find what she was looking for, she decided to make her own. Thus, her Digits & Doodles YouTube channel was born.
She familiarized herself with videography and editing footage and started filming lessons on state-required subjects such as fractions, decimals, multiplication and more. She also learned to limit her videos to six minutes to keep the viewer’s attention.
“I feel like I’m used to teaching in front of students all day, every day, so I pretend the camera is a classroom full of students when I’m recording, which it might be that exactly,” Farkas says.
Aside from being shown in a classroom, these videos are helpful for individual students struggling with a particular topic, a substitute teacher’s lesson plans, and parents who may not know how to help their kids with an at-home assignment.
“(There is) direct instruction (in the videos), but then we do a couple of questions together and I give them a couple of challenge problems… to check for understanding and to see if the student actually learned what they needed to learn,” she says.
As a former teacher, Farkas remembers the joy she felt when helping a student overcome a challenge, and she feels fulfilled knowing she is helping make those instances happen on a large scale.
“There's just something when you see like that aha moment in a kid's face when they finally get a concept, it's something so magical and wonderful,” she says.
Math made fun
To make the content entertaining, the format of the videos is a mix of animated and unanimated elements with helpful graphics, backgrounds and pop-ups she designed herself. She even created two animated characters – a girl, also named Caroline, and a math chicken – that pop in and out of frame during lessons.
“My students loved anything silly, and I think math is so serious, I needed a silly element,” Farkas says. “We needed some sort of animal and I actually came up with the chicken because my son, before he said ‘Mama,’ he actually said ‘chicken,’ so I’m like, ‘Okay, this is a sign.’ Now, anytime he sees me working or sees it on TV, he’s like, ‘Mama’s math chicken’s on TV.”
Since launching Doodles & Digits, Farkas has received an overwhelming amount of support and positive feedback from educators and parents.
“I’m surprised that it grew so quickly, but I’m also happy because I know it was something that I desperately needed in the classroom,” she says. “I’m really happy that so many teachers are finding it and it is gaining traction because at the end of the day… I am still a teacher. It’s kind of cool that even though I’m not in a physical classroom, I’m still in classrooms in some capacity helping teach math.”
TV math star
Farkas soon realized that she could do more than just film lessons.
She decided to help answer the common question teachers get asked – “When will I use this in real life?” – by shadowing professionals in various fields and exploring how they use mathematics in their careers. This was the premise for her PBS show, “How it’s Math.”
“It started out with an idea of me reaching out to a bunch of local businesses and saying, ‘Hey, I have this YouTube channel, would you be interested in being interviewed and I can tell your math story?” she says. “How we got on PBS is, I sent one of the videos to the National Education Telecommunications Association, or NEDA for short. They are one of the distributors to PBS…and they picked it up.”
During season one of “How it’s Math,” Farkas interviewed professionals working at local Westerville businesses including Asterisk Supper Club and Westerville Pediatric Dental. The dentist explained how he uses math and decimals for medication dosing, and Asterisk’s owner discussed mathematics’ involvement in pricing, percentages and bulk ordering.
Some professionals Farkas hopes to interview in season two include a veterinarian, a zookeeper and a videogame designer.
Farka’s followers
Doodles & Digits has a growing teacher advisory board that helps inform Farkas about what students are struggling with and what content they want to see.
Caroline Farkas
She also receives letters addressed to the math chicken from students and stays connected with teachers through Instagram and other forms of digital communication.
“Teachers will message me and say, ‘Hey, I can’t find anything for decimals,’ so I create a video on decimals, but I also have teachers send me posters like the kids are begging for a video about this specific topic and I’ll make it happen,” she says. “I will pretty much do anything to find the math…my limit is skydiving. I will not go skydiving. ”
At first, Farkas was creating these videos on her own from start to finish. Once her channel gained traction, she hired an editor and a PR representative, and she has dreams of taking Doodles & Digits even further.
“My goal is to keep growing to be an educational production company where we’ll have a full-time animator and illustrator, and a full production team so we can really expand on what we do and the characters, and the storylines,” Farkas says.
Maisie Fitzmaurice is an editor at CityScene Media Group. Feedback welcome at mfitzmaurice@cityscenemediagroup.com.
