Visual education: Learning Science Without Text

The problem

There are many persons in the world who cannot read. Even if they find someone to help them, most educational material is based on text so they can’t understand it. This makes learning extra difficult for them and slows down their progress in life.

The method

A huge amount of information reaches us visually: eyes are one of the most important sensors in the human body. We want to focus on this method of information intake for educational purposes.

The outcome

This project delivers educational material which is purely visual: “a textbook without text”. Creating illustrations in ingenious and inventive ways, putting them together in presentations and sharing them with the educational community.

About me

I am a professional in the semiconductor industry and have extensive experience in Physics research. Throughout my college and PhD studies I have helped tutoring students, and have always been fascinated by that moment when things “click” and they understand new concepts for the first time. In parallel to this I love doing illustration, so mixing both Art and Science is something that comes natural to me and I really like.

In 2019 I took a course at the Innovation Academy at UCD in Dublin, and this project came into my mind. I got in touch with two groups of students in Kenya and Zambia, applied the Design Thinking process and created some illustrations for them (with their very useful feedback). The result was really successful, interacting with some amazing people and creating lots of positive energy, so I decided to go ahead and make it a bigger project.

I want to personally thanks Kathleen and Maurice at UCD, the fantastic group of people in the class (“The curling post-its!”), Bernardoh in Kenya for his continuous feedback and Angela for helping me to engage with the students in Zambia. And of course to all the students who provided really helpful feedback! Let’s continue with this project and make it grow.