Posted: May 27, 2015 | Written by: Edith Noriega

Former Riverside City College math instructor Frank Ives put a unique spin in teaching mathematics that involved integrating YouTube, a highly popular video sharing website into his classes and student lives.

Ives, who taught at RCC for six years created his YouTube channel known as MathByFives in 2010 as a way to help keep students engaged.

“On the student evaluations forms one of the lowest marks that everybody got is keeping students engaged,” Ives said. “So I started working more on ways to keep students engaged.

This isn’t your ordinary class where you sit in a lecture class for two hours. It’s what Ives would describe as “edutainment.”

One of the things he does to help his students is tie it to pop culture.

In one of his lectures he talked about graphing the tangent and cotangent and stated “it comes from the bottom now it’s here.”

Some might know it as Drake’s song “Started from the bottom now we here.”

In the most recent video posted he made a parody on the hit show House of Cards and called it “House of Cardiods,” where you learn how to graph polar curves.

One thing he does not do in the 512 videos he has uploaded is putting advertisement.

“I believe in a quality education for anybody willing to spend the time it takes to learn,” Ives said.

After his videos began growing popularity he started integrating it in his students course work where they would watch a video and do the problems after.

“So in class I see what they are struggling on so then I know where to focus on in the videos,” Ives said.

One of his most popular videos on his channel is finding the domain and range racking up a quarter of a million views.

Another thing he tried doing is creating his own finishing move like some would remember in the popular video game Mortal Kombat.

He created his signature Box and Flower move one day in a trigonometry class after noticing the positive encouragement at the end of the problem on the online course management system.

“It kind of just happened because it’s a polar rose so I kept doing that,” Ives said.

Ives currently has more than 15,000 subscribers over 2 million views in 196 different countries.

He currently has a goal of making 1,000 videos but is sure to make more than 1,000 in the months to come.

Ives explained he gets approached once a month for business opportunities but deletes them.