I discovered this cool project called ?Picturing to Learn? today while talking to a friend who works for Dr. Rachael Brady. (Dr. Brady is the founder and head of the Visualization Technology group as well as the faculty advisor to the interdisciplinary studies and information sciences program at Duke University.) (Read more about it at here.)

The goal of Picturing to Learn seems to be getting students to understand concepts better as well as helping teachers learn how to explain ideas in a way that students unfamiliar with the material can relate and digest. This idea stems from the fact that people understand things better when they are forced to explain it to someone who knows nothing about the topic.

They are ?testing? on undergraduate students by asking them to ?clarify their own understanding of scientific concepts and processes by creating drawings that explain these concepts to non-experts?; With the help of students and researchers from Harvard, MIT, Duke, Roxbury Community College, and the School of Visual Arts in New York, they already have 4,000 drawings in their archive. You can look here to see several drawings that aimed to explain different types of chemical bonding. Thought processes definitely varied. Some tried using analogies while others went directly to the technical stuff. It would definitely be interesting to see if there is a drawing that appeals to a majority of people, or if it?s more of a to-each-to-it?s-own deal. Either way, a huge archive of these drawings could be really useful for students, who have yet to learn the concepts, and teachers, who might be able to gain insight from the different types of pictures and even the inaccurate ones.

My friend is a computer programmer working on the database development part of Picturing to Learn, so I asked her where the project is right now. She is using Prefuse, an online visualization tool for Java, to organize the student drawings that have been archived. I looked on their website, and it seems as if PTL is aiming for such a database ? ?searchable metadata for each drawing to help inform production of a visualization tool.? Following the idea of using the power of the collective whole underlying sites such as many eyes, digg, and youtube, perhaps the database could be made accessible on the world wide web, where students would be able to vote on which drawings were the most effective.