Visualization Project: PART II
VISUALIZATION PROCESS ANALYSIS
I am very much a visual learner. I need to be able to visualize a concept in my head in order for me to conceptualize and fully comprehend the content. Because of this, I have always loved Infographics, and so I chose to make an Infographic for my visualization project. I wanted to make the infographic in the style of one of my favorite web comics, The Oatmeal (My two favorite examples are his Mantis Shrimp infographic and his Nikola Tesla infographic). I love the way he streams a narrative with interesting and helpful imagery, fun text sizes and colors, and spacing to make learning about a new topic engaging and fun.
I have some experience with this style of infographic because I have made a couple drawing tutorials several years ago with a similar narrative flow and use of images and font/type stylization. However, that tutorial took me weeks to put together, and I only had a fraction of that time to finish this visualization project. Because of these time constraints, I chose to use Piktochart instead of Adobe Photoshop in the hopes that this platform would help speed-up the process with all its pre-set formatting tools and images. And it did! But I still ran out of time. There was a lot more I wished to include in the infographic, such as a short comic, new drawings i wanted to make, and more detailed images to illustrate the contents of the last page better. There was a lot of content concerning electricity I had to skip altogether simply because I ran out of time. For those interested, I pasted the full script I had planned at the end of this link
For the first couple days of the project, I spent several hours researching and making a script of all the information I wanted to include, how I would say it, and the kind of images or analogies that would go along with the script to help illustrate the concepts. I learned so much in these couple days; the process of trying to look at the concepts from the angle of "how am I going to draw or illustrate this" really forced me to critically analyze how much understanding of the topic I had, it also really helped in showing me what misconceptions I had when I realized something I was trying to conceptualize in a drawing contradicted a different conceptualization I had. But even without the images or drawings, the format of the project itself helped me realize and learn new things about my topic. By planning out how to best talk about electricity in a narrative sense, it really helped me understand and organize the material and concepts in my head, and helped me make better connections between the subtopics. I also learned a lot just from the fact that Electricity has always been my weakest subject, and so revisiting it now, with a personal intent and motivation, I learned a lot.
I have always loved reading visualizations as a learning tool, but I never would have guessed how FUN they would be to make, nor how much I would learn in such a short time by making one! I could have kept working on this for weeks and had a blast the entire time. I want to make a bunch more of these for different topics to bring into the classroom for my students. I also think Visualization projects like this would be an excellent learning strategy to implement in the classroom to have the kids do. The kids will get to be creative, they'll get practice putting science into their own words, it'll help form connections between topics to form a cohesive narrative, and they get to incorporate art with science! An excellent strategy all around :D
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| My Infographic on Electricity created using Piktochart |
I have some experience with this style of infographic because I have made a couple drawing tutorials several years ago with a similar narrative flow and use of images and font/type stylization. However, that tutorial took me weeks to put together, and I only had a fraction of that time to finish this visualization project. Because of these time constraints, I chose to use Piktochart instead of Adobe Photoshop in the hopes that this platform would help speed-up the process with all its pre-set formatting tools and images. And it did! But I still ran out of time. There was a lot more I wished to include in the infographic, such as a short comic, new drawings i wanted to make, and more detailed images to illustrate the contents of the last page better. There was a lot of content concerning electricity I had to skip altogether simply because I ran out of time. For those interested, I pasted the full script I had planned at the end of this link
For the first couple days of the project, I spent several hours researching and making a script of all the information I wanted to include, how I would say it, and the kind of images or analogies that would go along with the script to help illustrate the concepts. I learned so much in these couple days; the process of trying to look at the concepts from the angle of "how am I going to draw or illustrate this" really forced me to critically analyze how much understanding of the topic I had, it also really helped in showing me what misconceptions I had when I realized something I was trying to conceptualize in a drawing contradicted a different conceptualization I had. But even without the images or drawings, the format of the project itself helped me realize and learn new things about my topic. By planning out how to best talk about electricity in a narrative sense, it really helped me understand and organize the material and concepts in my head, and helped me make better connections between the subtopics. I also learned a lot just from the fact that Electricity has always been my weakest subject, and so revisiting it now, with a personal intent and motivation, I learned a lot.
I have always loved reading visualizations as a learning tool, but I never would have guessed how FUN they would be to make, nor how much I would learn in such a short time by making one! I could have kept working on this for weeks and had a blast the entire time. I want to make a bunch more of these for different topics to bring into the classroom for my students. I also think Visualization projects like this would be an excellent learning strategy to implement in the classroom to have the kids do. The kids will get to be creative, they'll get practice putting science into their own words, it'll help form connections between topics to form a cohesive narrative, and they get to incorporate art with science! An excellent strategy all around :D
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