Graphics in Education

• When do you prefer animated graphics to static ones?
• Why do you prefer one to the other?
• How beneficial are they for you?

I personally prefer animated graphics for learning and understanding complex tasks that require special skills to accomplish. In everyday life, we refer to books that provide both graphics and text to explain several concepts that I need for my education or primary profession. However, beyond that there is a wealth of subjects that could be learnt only through an instructor or by an animated sequence. Here are a few examples:

-         YouTube video explaining how to assemble a stroller or a piece of furniture. Surely it’s possible to follow the manual instructions but it’s a lot easier to understand when someone physically explains it and reminds you of the potential road blocks

-         YouTube video explaining how to tackle a plumbing problem. Specific instructions can save a lot of time and money in this case

-         Educational videos for my 2 year old son to learn alphabets and numbers. Books and pictures can do the job but the videos hold his attention

-         Lessons on specific skills like playing piano, perfecting a dance move or mastering a tennis stroke

These are just a few of the several situations where I prefer an animated video over a book or manual. Most of the consumer goods these days also come with a DVD disk that covers assembly, troubleshooting and maintenance instructions which are more efficient.

I prefer videos when it is easier to learn by watching or by following instructions than by trying to comprehend a subject matter through written text. There are several areas where the books are the only way to learn better and faster as it is impossible to use graphics and animations to teach certain concepts in literature, political science, education and mathematics. However, the progresses of internet websites like YouTube, Wikipedia, Google have immensely changed the fundamental way in which I learn today.

Learning through animation and videos has been tremendously beneficial for me. As I mentioned in the examples above, I would have to go through a lot of difficulty to learn many things that I currently do through videos on the internet. In addition to the above examples, animation has also helped me understand abstract principles which would have been otherwise taken me longer to grasp. In my last course, I had to understand the ‘stable marriage problem’ for my final project and the Wikipedia website had an accompanying animation sequence which helped me easily understand the steps of the algorithm.