Influencers of Education
Meet some faculty who are using large social media followings to make learning fun
By Eddie Hughes (’05)
Inside a spare room of his Fresno home, Dr. Raymond Hall stands amid hundreds of physics toys on display, eager to share them with anyone who shows curiosity.
Along the wall sits a light brown piece of IKEA furniture – with a wood-grained top that has become a trademark of sorts for Hall’s demonstrations on Instagram, where his @physicsfun account has 2 million followers. Yes, 2 million! He also has a Facebook presence with 731,000 followers and a YouTube channel with 610,000 subscribers.
Hall estimates he has the largest collection of physics and math toys in the world – more than 1,500. He maintains a spreadsheet to account for every one of them.
At any given time, Hall keeps plenty of the physics toys on hand in his McLane Hall office on campus at Fresno State. Currently, about 60 toys from his collection are on display as part of the “No Prior Art” exhibit at the Los Angeles Public Library.
But the overwhelming – emphasis on overwhelming – majority of his toys are on display in a spare room at his home that doubles as his video studio for his social media posts. “One room has all the toys laid out,” Hall says. “The full view of my eccentricity is on display here. There may be a bit of madness going on here.”
The madness has captivated quite the audience. He uses toys, both new and vintage, to demonstrate concepts like magnetic levitation, holography and rotational kinetic energy. Toys like a tippy top, clacker or gyroscope may look familiar, while others may be more unique or rare. Regardless, viewers will gain deeper insight into the science behind the demonstrations, what properties or scientific laws make things work the way they do and, oftentimes, who designed the toys or discovered the principles behind them.
“Physicists are kind of like kids who never grew up, in some ways” Hall says. “Our curiosity just never faded. We never stopped asking why.”
Origin of the Physics Toys
Hall’s collection of physics toys started when he was a graduate student. After earning his bachelor’s degree at Fresno State in 1988, he attended University of California, Riverside for his doctoral degree. While visiting his uncle in Occidental, he noticed a small toy store. “I went in there and saw some of the interesting toys they had on display. They were earthy, organic toys. I found a few that I realized, ‘oh, I could really demonstrate physics with that.’”
Later, while serving as a researcher and lecturer at University of California, Irvine, Hall applied to teach night classes at nearby Saddleback College to gain experience in the classroom. During his job interview, he used a clacker toy to demonstrate Newton’s third law – for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.
When he interviewed for his first faculty job at Fresno State in 1999, he gave a similar teaching demonstration.
“I think that part of the interview really helped me get both jobs. I passed the toy around. It’s my enthusiasm and using physics toys as a teaching tool that got me my university teaching gigs,” says Hall, who also serves as chair of the Academic Senate at Fresno State.
Hall spent his early high school years in Covina, before moving to Boulder City, Nevada. His father and grandfather were mechanically inclined, but Hall and his brother, also a Fresno State alumnus, are first-generation graduates. Hall has three children and four stepdaughters, including his youngest daughter who is now a physics professor at Chico State.
During his undergraduate years at Fresno State, Hall was further inspired by physics professor emeritus Dr. Manfred Bucher. “His class was centered on every five minutes being another demonstration,” Hall says. “You don’t just write it on the board, you manipulate something, and you get the students to invest – what do you think is going to happen next?”
Discovering Social Media
Hall, who is married to Dr. Katie Dyer, a child and family science professor at Fresno State, remembers the day he showed his stepdaughter a toy called a tippy top. When spun, it eventually jumps up on its stem. “I demonstrated this on a tabletop, and she took a video and posted it on her Instagram. Being a high school kid, she had a few hundred friends on social media, and she goes, ‘Look, 800 people liked this post!’”
“I soon after took a more controlled video and posted it. It got some likes, and I thought, ‘I have some other things just as interesting as that.’”
By the time he made 50 posts, in 2015, he had about 6,000 followers. Then, one of his videos went viral on Reddit. “I went from 6,000 followers to 20,000 followers in like three days. That’s what convinced me to start posting on a daily basis and it started to grow organically.”
By 2017, his Instagram had grown to 1 million followers – including Elon Musk, Adam Savage and Neil Patrick Harris.
Hall is able to monetize some of the content he produces, like his post of a perpetual motion simulator in which a ball rotates in a circle before rolling down a ramp and shooting back up to the funnel that got millions of views. “Any money I do make feeds the loop and exacerbates the madness,”
he says. “I’m running out of space to put things in my house.”
Hall says the whole point of these demonstrations is to surprise people and spark curiosity about why things work the way they do. “All the CGI and movies these days, with Harry Potter levitating things and flying about, people think they’ve seen it before. That’s fake. That’s pretend,” he says.
For followers of his Instagram page, that quote is the one that sums it all up – it’s the tagline on his page, after all.
Hall’s demonstrations appeal to all ages, whether it’s social media or in one of his physics courses on campus. He often gets invited to speak to physics students at other universities or present his work at museums. While he enjoys each venue, nothing gets the eyeballs his social media does.
“I use social media as a museum for science and math,” Hall says. “What if my toys were in a museum? How many people are going to see those? If you had a very well attended museum, there might be a couple hundred people per day getting to see these items and what they do. I have some videos that have a few hundred million views from all over the world. My objects have been seen by more eyes and have reached more people than a museum ever could.”
“Physics is the real magic.”
– Dr. Raymond Hall, Physics professor, chair of Academic Senate, Fresno State
Giving Math Social Appeal
Howie Hua, who teaches math at Fresno State, was honored with the Provost’s Award for Outstanding Lecturer earlier this year.
Hall isn’t the only Fresno State faculty member – or the only one in the university’s College of Science and Mathematics – influencing the masses on social media.
Howie Hua is so excited to announce that he is a math instructor at Fresno State. Go Bulldogs!
Anyone who frequents Hua’s social media channels might recognize that as one of Hua’s favorite running jokes. Any time he visits another campus, be it Maryland, Northwestern or Wisconsin, he posts a photo and says something like, “I am SO excited to announce that I am now a math instructor at the University of Maryland! Go Terrapins! I didn’t get a job here or anything, I’m just a math instructor physically on their campus.”
But Fresno State is the campus he truly calls home. He earned a bachelor’s and master’s at Fresno State while playing clarinet in the Bulldog Marching Band and wind orchestra, and has taught math on campus full-time since 2016.
Perhaps most impressively, Hua has built a following of almost 100,000 on TikTok and 90,000 on X (formerly Twitter). “I teach math to future elementary school teachers at Fresno State. I make math memes and explainer videos,” reads the X bio for @howie_hua.
“The kids are already there anyways, I might as well teach them something,” says Hua of social media. “I like to be a lifelong teacher, so I like to teach my past students. I have a newsletter of around 500 past students where I still keep in touch with them. I emailed them saying, ‘hey, if you still want to learn from me, follow me on TikTok.’”
In addition to his quick, informative social media math lessons on a whiteboard, Howie Hua is also known for his funny math memes, like the one above.
His social media presence is both fun and informative, featuring short, interesting math lessons and tricks. In many videos, he is wearing a funny math-related shirt, and he is also known for his math memes.
Hua films most of his content in the living room of his northeast Fresno apartment. He has a small, vertical whiteboard on the wall near his sofa. He sets his phone on a tripod with a mic and presses record. As soon as he writes the equation or formula on the board, his bubbly personality takes over, and he starts and stops himself until he delivers the day’s lesson exactly how he wants to.
“I’m just tired of a lot of education being behind a paywall, so I try to give everything I know for free,” Hua says.
He started using Twitter in 2017, and added TikTok in 2020 because he thought math could be marketed better. He estimates there are about 20 people teaching math on social media. Hua has found his niche in sharing new or unique ways of solving problems.
“I make videos that make math understandable because I think math is so much more than tricks,” Hua says. “In a lot of my videos, I explain why things work. For example, why does ‘keep, change, flip’ work when we’re dividing fractions? Or why does the long division algorithm work? Just multiple ways of doing math.”
Earlier this year, Hua was awarded the Provost’s Award for Outstanding Lecturer at Fresno State – an honor he could hardly believe.
An Emphasis on Education
“I make videos that make math understandable because I think math is so much more than tricks. In a lot of my videos, I explain why things work.”
Hua grew up in Hanford, where his parents owned and operated a Chinese restaurant from 1986 to 2006.
Hua and his sister, also a Fresno State alum, are first-generation college graduates. Their parents moved to Missouri from Vietnam in 1980. Their mother had a fourth-grade education before stopping school amid health challenges, and their father had an eighth-grade education before getting a job at a rice factory to help support the family.
“I think access to education is very important,” Hua says.
Hua points out that his father is very good at mental math, a concept Hua often promotes on his platforms. One of his biggest hits has been teaching people to subtract from left to right.
“I taught students, did you know you can subtract from left to right?” Hua says. “They were mindblown, and they were showing their friends and their family. We can think of math like that. It can be surprising.”
To Hua, math is an art and should be appreciated for what it is – the same way a poem or a piece of music would be. “I’m against the idea of everything needing to be applicable in math because math can be beautiful by itself,” Hua says.
While his following is growing larger by the day, his social media presence has helped him make a name for himself and develop a stream of supplemental income. He’s spoken to organizations in 20 states and four countries. In October, he was invited to be the closing keynote speaker for the National Council for Teachers of Mathematics in Chicago. He also recently presented at nine school assemblies in two days in Redding, and spoke at a conference in Saskatchewan, Canada.
Those experiences are nice, but Hua is most passionate for shared experiences and collaboration in the classroom. “I’m very big on multiple representations, multiple ways of doing something,” Hua says. “A lot of it is what I actually do in the classroom.”
And what an opportunity it is for Fresno State students who have the chance to take classes in person from educators like Hua and Hall with worldwide followings.
– Eddie Hughes is the senior editor for Fresno State Magazine.
