Hillbrook graduate Alex Nickel (HB class of 2016) is going bananas, and he’d love it if you would watch. In truth, “Alex Goes Bananas” is the name of Alex’s new video series on Nebula, a streaming platform for educational videos. In the show, Alex (who was born in 2001) explores pop culture from the late 1990’s and early 2000’s, learning for the first time about pop icons like “The Spice Girls”, “Gwen Stefani, “Limp Bizkit”, the movie “Clueless” and more. He discovers what made them famous and their impact on pop culture. For instance, did you know besides their catchy songs, The Spice Girls also popularized the slogan, “Girl Power”?
Long before he went “Bananas”, Alex was creating educational videos for his YouTube channel, “Technicality”. On Technicality, Alex researches and explains things he finds fascinating from history, psychology, technology and science. Among other things, his Technicality episodes have explored the origins of the word “bamboozle,” explained the historical significance of the Newton Pippin apple, looked at how toilets work, why chocolate is shiny, the origin of the selfie, and whether “Seinfeld” is funny in translation.
It is a project he started while in sixth grade at Hillbrook. Six years and more than 80 episodes later, Technicality is still going strong. It has over 55 thousand subscribers and millions of total views. Along the way, Alex has gained recognition from the Huffington Post, Mashable, and CBS’s “Undercover Boss.” He has made guest appearances on other popular educational YouTube Channels from “Physics Girl” to “Counter Arguments” and Tom Scott. He has given a popular TedX talk, and delighted as his Technicality videos have become assigned viewing in classrooms all over the world. If that weren’t enough for this recent high school graduate, Alex also wrote a book in 2019 about composting entitled, “Behold This Compost” where he looks at city-wide composting programs and why they are needed.
Alex, who graduated from The Nueva High School in spring 2020 and is attending Washington University in St. Louis this fall, is clearly not only curious, but very energetic. Asked how he got started making educational videos, Alex points to Hillbrook and his 6th grade science class. The class, which focused on problem-solving and design thinking, challenged students to find a problem and try to fix it. Initially, Alex intended to design a better “GoPro,” but he was diverted by the notion of educational videos. As he tells it, Alex and his buddies often spent lunch hours watching educational YouTube videos in the Hillbrook Innovation Lab (Hillbrook’s old design classroom). Says Alex, “I started thinking, ‘I can do that.’” One weekend he tried making his own educational video. He showed it to the 6th grade science teacher who loved it, telling him, ‘Alex, you need to do more of that!’”
So, instead of designing a better “GoPro,” Alex decided the problem he would solve is student engagement in the learning process. He studied blended learning (where students learn via electronic and online media as well as traditional face-to-face teaching) and used his research to create Technicality, a video series that explains science and history through entertaining YouTube videos. He made videos throughout middle school at Hillbrook and continued in high school at Nueva. Alex says the encouragement of his sixth grade teacher and the lessons of Hillbrook’s core values “Be Kind, Be Curious, Take Risks and Be Your Best” were fundamental to his success. Says Alex, “I definitely think of Hillbrook’s core values in a lot of the things I do. A lot of my projects are infused with curiosity, I want to learn more about the world, and also risk-taking, a lot of the stuff I’m learning for the first time with the viewer and those two things combine to make a powerful experience”.
Alex says Hillbrook’s emphasis on problem-solving and asking questions helped him not only with his Technicality series, but also the rigors of high school at Nueva. He says, “Going into Nueva I was 100% prepared to handle the material because I knew how to approach problems. In 8th grade geometry, Mr. Sears really taught us how to think about and break down problems, as opposed to just the rote learning of mathematics. That was really helpful because it taught me how to approach challenges in the future.” Alex says he never could have handled linear algebra senior year at Nueva if not for the math foundation he received at Hillbrook.
At Hillbrook, Alex was student-body Co-Head where he was known for his enthusiastic and irresistibly goofy Monday Flag presentations. He created a “Wheel of Awesome” to celebrate student achievements, and is still proud of being part of the student-led effort to bring navy shirts to the Hillbrook uniform code. Looking back on his Hillbrook days, Alex says he appreciates having grown up in a community of learners, thinkers and people just as curious as him.
After taking a gap year in the 2020-21 school year, Alex will enter WashU with an “undeclared” major saying he wants to learn how to become a fulfilled thinker. He is interested in philosophy and sociology because he says, “understanding how humans work and the systems we create will be helpful information going forward”. He intends to continue his YouTube Technicality series which he describes as “his passion and his calling” and says everything he learns in college about science and humanities will only add depth to his videos.
Says Alex, “I don’t know exactly the path I will take, but I am leaning into the uncertainty.” Indeed, to watch Alex embrace life as a giant learning opportunity, well, let’s just say going bananas has never looked so appealing.
