PICTURE TO LEARN

If a picture is worth a thousand words, perhaps drawing and visualizing can help science students understand more than they get from their textbooks.

MIT research scientist and science photographer Felice Frankel is exploring this idea through "Picturing to Learn," an educational technique that is being tested at MIT.

Picturing to Learn is creating a data base of over 4000 drawings from various science undergraduate courses. Students are asked to respond to a homework question by creating a visual explanation whose purpose is to teach a high school senior about that particular phenomenon. They are also asked to "evaluate" their own drawings.

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