Essay On Visual Literacy

1 Introduction to the project
Reason to start this project
This is a final year project appointed to me by my personal tutor during my third year study as an undergraduate for mechanical engineering in University of Nottingham
We wanted to design a better experiment for 1st year undergraduate engineering students regarding heat conduction in a solid material.
How do this experiment benefits your learning?
Learn about LABView, circuit connection for temperature data acquiring using thermocouple and DAQ module and how visual literacy benefits the learning of students.

2 Literature Review on Visual Literacy
2.1 What is Visual Literacy?
Wileman(1993) defines visual literacy as “the ability to ‘read’, interpret, and understand information presented in pictorial or graphic images” [1]
Wikipedia defines visual literacy as the ability to interpret, negotiate, and make meaning from information presented in the form of an image. Visual literacy is based on the idea that pictures can be “read” and that meaning can be communicated through a process of reading. [2]
In general, visual literacy means the way of teaching or learning through graphical method.
2.2 Why Visual Literacy?
In the United States, kids spent 22,000 hours on watching television till they graduated high school. [3]
By the age of 21, the average student would have spent 10,000 hours on video games; sent or received 200,000 emails; talked for 10,00 on cell phones; but read for just 5,000 hours. [4]
Today’s world is highly congested in images and motion pictures. Kids were exposed to television when they were young. We see pictures everywhere we go, billboard sign, brochures, internet websites and almost every advertisement we see has picture in it. Motion pictures and images is now the new way we convey messages.
But why? According to research from 3M Corporation, we process visuals 60,000 times faster than text. This is because we take in all the data from an image simultaneously while we process text in a sequential fashion. [5] Instead of using a chunk wall of text to convey our message, we could use an image to describe everything or most of the things that we wanted to say, that is why the saying “a picture is worth a thousand words”.
2.3 How do we benefit from visual literacy in this project?
In our modern day, the need for visualization is manifest in many areas, especially in engineering graphics (drafting), engineering, construction, graphic design, marketing, and manufacturing. Engineering graphics is remarkably illustrative of the need for pictures. [6] In engineering field, we could describe the effect of tensile loaded material in text as:
“The strain of an axially tensile loaded item is directly proportional to the stress applied, in which highest amount of strain occurs a point of necking. Where necking point is the section where the cross-sectional area of the object tested (which is a rod in this case) is smallest. At first the strain is directly proportional with the stress applied. Till necking occurs and the stress-strain relationship is no longer linear. Further deformation will result if breaking the rod.”

Or we can represent this phenomenon with just a graph and a picture as shown below.

Figure 2.1

Figure 2.2

Which criteria explain the phenomenon better? A: Text only, B: Picture and Graph only, or C: Both text, picture and graph. Undoubtedly it would be criteria C. However, it is undeniable that the graph and picture plays a major role in conveying the message. Most students including myself would look at the picture first before reading the text if both of them are on the same page.
In this project “insert long project name here”, we build an experiment for first year student to learn about the heat transfer in solid material. We exploit the psychological advantage of visual literacy by using LABView to control the experiment and create a user-friendly interface so as to aid the student in understanding

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