Substantial Contribution #2

Challenge A

For Challenge A, my comic, The Power of Habits, focused on a complex psychological process, “habit formation”. I turned this complicated concept into something easily digestible and visually appealing. I used Mayer’s Multimedia Learning Theory to make sure the visuals supported the text and to help enhance the comprehension of the comic. I learned throughout the process that reducing text and emphasizing text with color and adding figures helped with the clarity of the comic. This helped both the signaling and redundancy principles of multimedia. I learned that simplifying complex information is harder than I initially expected. In the beginning, I thought including more details would make the comic more informative, but throughout the design process and after receiving peer feedback, I uncovered that less is more. I learned that communicating educational content effectively requires thinking like a learner. It is helpful to think from a learner’s perspective about how they would grasp certain topics.

Challenge B

When I started working on Challenge B, I wanted to apply the lessons that I learned from Challenge A. Working in a group to create Healthy and Balanced Eating shifted my focus from design to collaboration. Working alongside two peers challenged me to balance all of our creative ideas across three people while meeting the criteria. This is a challenge that I did not realize I would face. However, after getting used to working as a group, I enjoyed the ability to bounce ideas off each other. We discussed what our target audience should be given our topic and how we can help engage learners. I used what I learnt about how “less is more” when designing my how-to part 3 video.