There’s a special assignment I have designed for my visualization course that I have been using successfully for a number of years. I call it “mini-projects”. A mini-project is a project students can develop over 1 or 2 weeks. It’s big enough to simulate nontrivial decisions designers have to make in real projects, and it’s small enough to be carried out in a small amount of time. That is, it’s efficient and effective.
Great idea and I really appreciate your work on setting this up and 'testing' it! I plan to use it in my undergrad Viz course this Fall. Should be a great learning tool!
Thanks for the post. When I was a TA for a programming lab back in the day I did a variant of this where I asked students to resubmit their assignments if they could think of a better way of solving the problem/ or if they wanted to try a different programming language, and get extra credit. I also would give an optional challenging addendum to the original problem just to get some more engagement who were more advanced with their programming.
I felt the students were more appreciative and engaged when they were incentivized to try different methods or experiment with different ideas.
Thanks for sharing this, Enrico. I am going to finish the teaching of my data visualization course next week^_^ It is a great idea to ask students to do this kind of mini-projects and ask all the students to comment on the designs one by one.
My current practice is that I will provide students with the dataset, tasks, and some problematic visualizations I deliberately created. Then I will ask students to comment on the designs and further improve the designs by sketching their new designs. The advantage of my practice is that students' feedback can converge and it is easy for grading. But it may be not good for inspiring students to come up with more interesting designs. Will try such mini-projects in my teaching in the future.
Yes - On a side note, by doing this type of collective critique over and over again I discovered how incredibly limited data visualization theory is. It kind of crashes at every turn! There are a lot of books on Data Viz, but they are mostly opinions not theories, I have a skeleton draft for the theory book, always drafting it!
Great idea and I really appreciate your work on setting this up and 'testing' it! I plan to use it in my undergrad Viz course this Fall. Should be a great learning tool!
Thanks for the post. When I was a TA for a programming lab back in the day I did a variant of this where I asked students to resubmit their assignments if they could think of a better way of solving the problem/ or if they wanted to try a different programming language, and get extra credit. I also would give an optional challenging addendum to the original problem just to get some more engagement who were more advanced with their programming.
I felt the students were more appreciative and engaged when they were incentivized to try different methods or experiment with different ideas.
Thanks for sharing this, Enrico. I am going to finish the teaching of my data visualization course next week^_^ It is a great idea to ask students to do this kind of mini-projects and ask all the students to comment on the designs one by one.
My current practice is that I will provide students with the dataset, tasks, and some problematic visualizations I deliberately created. Then I will ask students to comment on the designs and further improve the designs by sketching their new designs. The advantage of my practice is that students' feedback can converge and it is easy for grading. But it may be not good for inspiring students to come up with more interesting designs. Will try such mini-projects in my teaching in the future.
Yes - On a side note, by doing this type of collective critique over and over again I discovered how incredibly limited data visualization theory is. It kind of crashes at every turn! There are a lot of books on Data Viz, but they are mostly opinions not theories, I have a skeleton draft for the theory book, always drafting it!