Using animations to aid in acoustic teaching lectures

In teaching acoustics, derivations can be difficult to convey to students. Oftentimes, a whiteboard is used to discuss the ideas of the math behind a certain derivation or equation. Using MANIM, an open-source Python library, animations can be made of derivations integrated with visual aids to help students understand parts of acoustic math. The library and creator have gained popularity over the years through the YouTube channel known as 3blue1brown which presents popular math topics such as convolution, neural networks, and linear algebra. Animations, specifically for introductory acoustics courses, have been developed using MANIM and will be presented in this work. These animations include long form videos of a mass-spring oscillator and finite difference derivations as well as short form videos of Gram–Schmidt orthogonalization, and bilinear transformations. This Python library can be downloaded from Anaconda Python distribution and is an excellent way to develop supplemental material to help students understand concepts within the acoustics field.