I have been training my eye for graphic design for a long time and it is very interesting to hear the things that I have either learned from experience or have gathered from different teachers and people throughout my life. In middle school, I was required to create and submit a science fair project every year. I had to come up with a hypothesis, test it, write a report, create a booth with a tri-fold, and present my findings to my class with a PowerPoint. This was then marked by judges at our school science fair, and I was even once selected to go to Calgary’s city-wide science fair. I have been making use of Mayer’s multimedia principles such as signaling, redundancy, cognitive load, etc. without knowing that they had names. The same applies to my knowledge from my art classes, such as the concept of using colour schemes like monochromatic or complementary, or photography rules like leading lines and the rule of thirds; it is intriguing to see them laid out in a different context, as ‘design principles’ rather than ‘artistic tools’. I still use these ideas while planning and writing my comic; even though it isn’t teaching per se, I still have to use tactics like these to convey a particular message. Since learning more in-depth about them, I have been trying to be more conscious of them while creating my storyboards. (If you would like to take a look at my comic, I have linked it below!)

How we were instructed to complete these science fair projects makes me wonder if my teacher had knowledge of things like Merrill’s First Principles of Instruction, because we were instructed to conduct and create our projects following these sorts of methods, or if the nature of science fair projects just happens to fall in line with them. For audience engagement, we were encouraged to have a hands-on example of sorts to help onlookers understand what our project was on. For example, the year that I went to the city-wide fair, I had done a project on the efficacy of insulation for soundproofing. So I brought the box which I constructed to test the insulations with me to the fair and allowed people to conduct the experiment for themselves. Looking at it through Merrill’s lens, by asking them what sort of insulation they had at home, if they had concerns regarding sound-proofing, demonstrating the difference between their insulation and a different one, and having them make guesses as to why the results occurred in that way, I was following their First Principles pretty closely.

Looking back on my school years, including my four years in university, I can say retrospectively that the classes in which teachers followed the aforementioned principles as well as Instructional Design, Constructive Alignment, and Backward Design were the classes that I both did the best in as well as the ones that were the most memorable. Being able to know what you are learning, recognize it, and apply it has always been the most effective way of learning for me. For example, my anatomy courses always coordinated the labs with the lectures, allowing the learning that we were doing in lecture to be applied to that week’s lab. When we focused on muscle tissue, our lab was analyzing the tissue under a microscope and identifying the tissues visually on samples. In addition, having access to simulated dissections and diagrams that were interactive with various tissue levels helped to link all of the topics together and build upon my learning. I wish that this sort of learning was more available in topics like mathematics, as I think this would greatly improve the level of information retention of the average student.

This is the link to my comic, Out of the Blue:

https://www.webtoons.com/en/challenge/out-of-the-blue/list?title_no=723028