In the context of a classroom lesson, concepts must be visualized and organized in many ways depending on the needs of the teacher and students. Traditional presentation media such as the blackboard or electronic whiteboard allow for static hand-drawn images, and slideshow software may be used to generate linear sequences of text and pre-animated images. However, none of these media support the creation of dynamic visualizations that can be manipulated, combined, or re-animated in real-time, and so demonstrating new concepts or adapting to changes in the requirements of a presentation is a challenge. Thus, we propose Chalktalk as a solution. Chalktalk is an open-source presentation and visualization tool in which the user's drawings are recognized as animated and interactive "sketches," which the user controls via mouse gestures. Sketches help users demonstrate and experiment with complex ideas (e.g. computer graphics, procedural animation, logic) during a live presentation without needing to create and structure all content ahead of time. Because sketches can interoperate and be programmed to represent underlying data in multiple ways, Chalktalk presents the opportunity to visualize key concepts in computer science: especially data structures, whose data and form change over time due to the variety of interactions within a computer system. To show Chalktalk's capabilities, we have prototyped sketch implementations for binary search tree (BST) and stack (LIFO) data structures, which take advantage of sketches' ability to interact and change at run-time. We discuss these prototypes and conclude with considerations for future research using the Chalktalk platform.
In visualization education, both science and humanities, the literature is often divided into two parts: the design aspect and the analysis of the visualization. However, we find limited discussion on how to motivate and engage visualization students in the classroom. In the field of Writing Studies, researchers develop tools and frameworks for student peer review of writing. Based on the literature review from the field of Writing Studies, this paper proposes a new framework to implement visualization peer review in the classroom to engage today's students. This framework can be customized fo…
The amount of visual communication we are facing is rapidly increasing, and skills to process, understand, and generate visual representations are in high demand. Especially students focusing on computer graphics and visualization can benefit from a more diverse education on visual literacy, as they often have to work on graphical representations for broad masses after their graduation. Our proposed teaching approach incorporates basic design thinking principles into traditional visualization and graphics education. Our course was inspired by the book Dear Data that was the subject of a lively…
The aim of visualization is to support people in dealing with large and complex information structures, to make these structures more comprehensible, facilitate exploration, and enable knowledge discovery. However, users often have problems reading and interpreting data from visualizations, in particular when they experience them for the first time. A lack of visualization literacy, i.e., knowledge in terms of domain, data, visual encoding, interaction, and also analytical methods can be observed. To support users in learning how to use new digital technologies, the concept of onboarding has b…
Due to their pedagogical advantages, large final projects in information visualization courses have become standard practice. Students take on a client--real or simulated--a dataset, and a vague set of goals to create a complete visualization or visual analytics product. Unfortunately, many projects suffer from ambiguous goals, over or under-constrained client expectations, and data constraints that have students spending their time on non-visualization problems (e.g., data cleaning). These are important skills, but are often secondary course objectives, and unforeseen problems can majorly hin…
This workshop focuses on visualization education, literacy, and activities. It aims to streamline previous efforts and initiatives of the visualization community to provide a format for education and engagement practices in visualization. It intends to bring together junior and senior scholars to share research and experience and to discuss novel activities, teaching methods, and research challenges. The workshop aims to serve as a platform for interdisciplinary researchers within and beyond the visualization community such as education, learning analytics, science communication, psychology, o…
What Do Visualization Instructors Want Students to Learn? Introducing a Concept Inventory for Visualization Design
Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington（华盛顿大学保罗·G·艾伦计算机科学与工程学学院）；Department of Human Centered Design and Engineering at the University of Washington（华盛顿大学以人为本的设计与工程系）
Newcastle University（纽卡斯尔大学）；The Alan Turing Institute（艾伦·图灵研究所）
We present a case study in the use of machine+human mixed intelligence for visualization quality assessment, applying automated visualization quality metrics to support the human assessment of data visualizations produced as coursework by students taking higher education courses. A set of image informatics algorithms including edge congestion, visual saliency and colour analysis generate machine analysis of student visualizations. The insight from the image informatics outputs has proved helpful for the marker in assessing the work and is also provided to the students as part of a written repo…
Building on game design and education research, this paper introduces narrative-focused role-playing games as a way to promote visualization literacy in young children. Visualization literacy skills are vital in understanding the world around us and constructing meaningful visualizations, yet, how to better develop these skills at an early age remains largely overlooked and understudied. Only recently has the visualization community started to fill this gap, resulting in preliminary studies and development of educational tools for use in early education. We add to these efforts through the exp…
Many of the guidelines that inform how designers create data visualizations originate in studies that unintentionally exclude populations that are most likely to be among the 'data poor'. In this paper, we explore which factors may drive attention and trust in rural populations with diverse economic and educational backgrounds - a segment that is largely underrepresented in the data visualization literature. In 42 semi-structured interviews in rural Pennsylvania (USA), we find that a complex set of factors intermix to inform attitudes and perceptions about data visualization - including educat…
Students of visualization come to formal education with an abundance of personal experience. However, one's exposure to graphics through media and education may not be sufficiently diverse to appreciate the nuance and complexity required to design and evaluate effective representations. While many introductory courses in visualization address best practices for visual encoding of data based on perceptual characteristics, as cognitive scientists, we place equal value on representational decisions based on communicative context: how the representation is intended to be used. In this pedagogical …
Peer review is a widely utilized pedagogical feedback mechanism for engaging students, which has been shown to improve educational outcomes. However, we find limited discussion and empirical measurement of peer review in visualization coursework. In addition to engagement, peer review provides direct and diverse feedback and reinforces recently-learned course concepts through critical evaluation of others' work. In this paper, we discuss the construction and application of peer review in a computer science visualization course, including: projects that reuse code and visualizations in a feedba…
A Large-Scale Feasibility Study of Screen-based 3D Visualization and Augmented Reality Tools for Human Anatomy Education: Exploring Gender Perspectives in Learning Experience
Understanding your audience is foundational to creating high impact visualization designs. However, individual differences and cognitive abilities also influence interactions with information visualization. Differing user needs and abilities suggest that an individual's background could influence cognitive performance and interactions with visuals in a systematic way. This study builds on current research in domain-specific visualization and cognition to address if domain and spatial visualization ability combine to affect performance on information visualization tasks. We measure spatial visu…
Architectural Education faces limitations due to its tactile approach to learning in classrooms with only 2-D and 3-D tools. At a higher level, virtual reality provides a potential for delivering more information to individuals undergoing design learning. This paper investigates a hypothesis establishing grounds towards a new research in Building Information Modeling (BIM) and Virtual Reality (VR). The hypothesis is projected to determine best practices for content creation and tactile object virtual interaction, which potentially can improve learning in architectural & construction education …
Fostering data visualization literacy (DVL) as part of childhood education could lead to a more data literate society. However, most work in DVL for children relies on a more formal educational context (i.e., a teacher-led approach) that limits children's engagement with data to classroom-based environments and, consequently, children's ability to ask questions about and explore data on topics they find personally meaningful. We explore how a curiosity-driven, child-led approach can provide more agency to children when they are authoring data visualizations. This paper explores how informal le…
Visual representations are becoming important in science communication and education. This explorative study investigates the perception of STEM researchers, without any specific visual design background, and the value of visual representations as tools to support the communication of technical and scientific knowledge among academics and a wider non-technical community. Early findings show that visual representations can positively support scientists to share research outcomes in a more compelling, visually clear, and impactful manner, reaching a wider audience across different disciplines.
The MolecularWeb Universe: Web-Based, Immersive, Multiuser Molecular Graphics And Modeling, for Education and Work in Chemistry, Structural Biology, and Materials Sciences
Event sequence data is increasingly available. Many business operations are supported by information systems that record transactions, events, state changes, message exchanges, and so forth. This observation is equally valid for various industries, including production, logistics, healthcare, financial services, education, to name but a few. The variety of application areas explains that techniques for event sequence data analysis have been developed rather independently in different fields of computer science. Most prominent are contributions from information visualization and from process mi…
Visualization, as a vibrant field for researchers, practitioners, and higher educational institutions, is growing and evolving very rapidly. Tremendous progress has been made since 1987, the year often cited as the beginning of data visualization as a distinct field. As such, the number of visualization resources and the demand for those resources are increasing at a very fast pace. We present a collection of open visualization resources for all those with an interest in interactive data visualization and visual analytics. Because the number of resources is so large, we focus on collections of…
Understanding player strategies is a key question when analyzing player behavior both for academic researchers and industry practitioners. For game designers and game user researchers, it is important to gauge the distance between intended strategies and emergent strategies; this comparison allows identification of glitches or undesirable behaviors. For academic researchers using games for serious purposes such as education, the strategies adopted by players are indicative of their cognitive progress in relation to serious goals, such as learning process. Current techniques and systems created…
Designing Born-Accessible Courses in Data Science and Visualization: Challenges and Opportunities of a Remote Curriculum Taught by Blind Instructors to Blind Students
Understanding a visualization is a multi-level process. A reader must extract and extrapolate from numeric facts, understand how those facts apply to both the context of the data and other potential contexts, and draw or evaluate conclusions from the data. A well-designed visualization should support each of these levels of understanding. We diagnose levels of understanding of visualized data by adapting Bloom's taxonomy, a common framework from the education literature. We describe each level of the framework and provide examples for how it can be applied to evaluate the efficacy of data visu…
We present a state-of-the-art report on visualization in astrophysics. We survey representative papers from both astrophysics and visualization and provide a taxonomy of existing approaches based on data analysis tasks. The approaches are classified based on five categories: data wrangling, data exploration, feature identification, object reconstruction, as well as education and outreach. Our unique contribution is to combine the diverse viewpoints from both astronomers and visualization experts to identify challenges and opportunities for visualization in astrophysics. The main goal is to pro…
Through the WordStream Glass: Revisiting Quantitative Encoding for Qualitative Learning Analytics
Harvard Medical School（哈佛医学院）；University of New Hampshire（新罕布什尔大学）；Hanoi University of Science and Technology（河内科学技术大学）；University of Washington Bothell（华盛顿大学博塞尔分校）
3D modeling is becoming a well-developed field of medicine, but its applicability can be limited due to the lack of software allowing for easy utilizations of generated 3D visualizations. By leveraging recent advances in virtual reality, we can rapidly create immersive anatomical scenes as well as allow multiple users to occupy the same virtual space: i.e., over a local or distributed network. This setup is ideal for pre-surgical planning and education, allowing users to identify and study structures of interest. I demonstrate here such a pipeline on a broad spectrum of anatomical models and d…
Due to the success of deep learning (DL) and its growing job market, students and researchers from many areas are interested in learning about DL technologies. Visualization has proven to be of great help during this learning process. While most current educational visualizations are targeted towards one specific architecture or use case, recurrent neural networks (RNNs), which are capable of processing sequential data, are not covered yet. This is despite the fact that tasks on sequential data, such as text and function analysis, are at the forefront of DL research. Therefore, we propose expl…
Visualizing a Collective Student Model for Procedural Training Environments
International University SEK（SEK国际大学）；ETS de Ingenieros Informáticos, UPM（马德里理工大学计算机工程学院）；E.T.S.I. Forestal y del Medio Natural, UPM（马德里理工大学林业与自然环境工程学院）
We present RealitySketch, an augmented reality interface for sketching interactive graphics and visualizations. In recent years, an increasing number of AR sketching tools enable users to draw and embed sketches in the real world. However, with the current tools, sketched contents are inherently static, floating in mid air without responding to the real world. This paper introduces a new way to embed dynamic and responsive graphics in the real world. In RealitySketch, the user draws graphical elements on a mobile AR screen and binds them with physical objects in real-time and improvisational w…
Problem-driven visualization work is rooted in deeply understanding the data, actors, processes, and workflows of a target domain. However, an individual's personality traits and cognitive abilities may also influence visualization use. Diverse user needs and abilities raise natural questions for specificity in visualization design: Could individuals from different domains exhibit performance differences when using visualizations? Are any systematic variations related to their cognitive abilities? This study bridges domain-specific perspectives on visualization design with those provided by co…
