Solution: School
Answer: CASHLESS COACHING
Written by aki
This puzzle consists of two parts - a series of chemical reactions and a series of blanks. The first step is to identify what the chemical reactions represent. Equations 3, 8 and 10 are likely to be the easiest ins, from which we can identify that the LHS of the reactions are deconstructed logos of famous educational Youtube channels (ordered alphabetically). The flavor image also clues this, as it is itself a deconstruction of the Youtube logo (a right-pointing equilateral triangle on a red rectangular background).
| Reactant 1 | Reactant 2 | Channel | Product | Youtube Video |
| Eye | ¼ brown, ¾ blue pie chart | 3Blue1Brown | Windmill | The unexpectedly hard windmill question (2011 IMO, Q2) |
| Gear | Round-bottom flask | CGP Grey | Hexagons | Hexagons are the Bestagons |
| Red apple | C2 | Crash Course | American Revolution | Tea, Taxes, and the American Revolution: Crash Course World History #28 |
| Green hexagon | Two leaves | Khan Academy | Springs | Intro to Springs and Hooke’s Law | Work and Energy | Physics | Khan Academy |
| Orange square | M | Mathologer | Futurama | The parity of permutations and the Futurama theorem |
| Omega | P | Minute Physics | Bells | Bell’s Theorem: The Quantum Venn Diagram Paradox |
| Red agar | Concentric circles | NileRed | Traffic Light | Recreating the Chemical Traffic Light Reaction |
| Brown parchment paper | π | Numberphile | Queen | The 8 Queen Problem – Numberphile |
| Head with brain looking left | Red neon light strip | Smarter Every Day | Motocross | The Physics of Motocross – Smarter Every Day 30 |
| Blue circle | Ve | Veritasium | Butterfly | Chaos: The Science of the Butterfly Effect |
After identifying all the Youtube channels, we move on to identifying what the products represent. Here, there are many easy ins such as equations 1, 5, 7 or 10. We find that each product represents a particular video (which are what Youtube channels produce, and further clued by the flavor image product being a clapperboard with a graduation cap) from the corresponding channel. In particular, the word that each picture represents appears verbatim within the title of the video being referenced. (Some of these channels have multiple videos containing the clued word(s), but it is always possible to find the correct video based on the blanks below.)
After identifying the videos, we fill in the blanks at the bottom, which are ordered alphabetically by video name. Punctuation is provided, and both numbers and letters are to be filled in. Once this is complete, we are asked to extract two sets of strings, denoted by the blanks from A1 to A63 and B1 to B59. Once extracted we obtain the strings
A: YELLOW CIRCLE PLUS BLACK E2 ARROW WHY BECOMING A 8 SOCIETY IS A TERRIBLE IDEA
B: EMPTY BACKGROUND PLUS RED TEDX ARROW LEADING AND 8 MARK SMITH TEDX MSVU
With these cluephrases, we are able to iterate what we did in the first part of the puzzle and observe that these cluephrases also reference two videos from educational channels.
| Reactant 1 | Reactant 2 | Channel | Product | Youtube Video |
| Yellow circle | Black E2 | Economics Explained | Why becoming a 8 society is a terrible idea | Why becoming a CASHLESS society is a terrible idea |
| Empty background | Red TEDx | TEDx | Leading and 8 Mark Smith TEDxMSVU | Leading & COACHING | Mark Smith | TEDxMSVU |
Due to the lack of images, the format for the reactions is slightly different from the previous reactions in the puzzle, but nonetheless retains the same basic idea and we are still able to identify the precise video referenced by each reaction. Once identified, we extract the words in the video title which was replaced by the corresponding number of letters in the equation, which tells us the type of teaching this school seems to provide – CASHLESS COACHING!
Author's Notes
For solvers who regularly watch edutubers, did you have that eye-roll moment of “I should totally have seen this sooner” once you understood what was going on? Let us know! (Our internal testsolvers want to know.)
Due to the extraction of a word from the video titles, it was necessary to give the entire video title as part of the final cluephrase equations to indicate which word to extract. Of course, in this case, solvers can simply search for the RHS of the cluephrase equations verbatim without identifying the channels first. However, I decided that this was fine because by this point in the puzzle, solvers would have already gotten the aha, so forcing solvers to spend more time searching up educational Youtube channels would not be productive or interesting.