How to teach technical concepts with cartoons | Hacker News Reader

How to teach technical concepts with cartoons

jvns.ca

170 pointsTomte23 comments

I worked with an analyst a few years ago. I'll call her Alice. Alice wasn't very good at her job. She was ok and could get stuff done with sufficient hand-holding. The problem was she was really insecure.

Alice worried that she wasn't smart enough or experienced enough in this particular industry to do her job. She was. But she had the air of someone who was always worried about being found out. So instead of talking with the managers or users that she should have been talking to to get her work done, she would go to people she trusted, like me, who liked to be helpful when they could and who, as a developer or someone who had been with the company a while, might know a little something of how what she was asking about worked, but probably shouldn't have been the person she was talking to. This annoyed a lot of people.

What she was really good at was decorating her cubicle. She was a genius at it. She would do it for every major holiday and even some of the minor ones.

Alice's boss liked to gripe about her to me. She hadn't hired Alice, didn't really like her, and didn't offer her much support.

We had a lot of arcane business processes. I thought it would be nice if we could throw some light on these, maybe come up with some charts or creative visualizations that could serve as a general reference. Cartoons like this would have have been great.

One year, around Halloween, when the company sponsored a cubicle-decorating contest with prizes, Alice's boss was complaining to me about how much effort Alice had put into decorating her cubicle. It was impressive. She had turned it into a little haunted house.

I suggested to Alice's boss maybe trying to leverage Alice's cubicle-decorating skills to visualize some of these business processes and workflows.

A few weeks later Alice was laid off.

What's the moral of the story?

I see you aren't familiar with the works of Franz Kafka.

A+ troll would rage again.

Forest M. Mims III was a master at using cartoons in his electrical engineering books. Just look at the happy and sad lightbulbs on page 1 of Getting Started in Electronics[1].

Using cartoons a great way to disarm the reader, especially children, into believing the subject matter will be understandable. I don't know if Mims used cartoons to make engineering appeal to children, but it certainly had that affect on me.

[1]http://www.flickriver.com/photos/mightyohm/tags/forrestmmims...

Some of my favorite comics about technical topics:

http://dilbert.com/strip/2000-03-19

http://www.kevinandkell.com/2000/kk1029.html

http://www.kevinandkell.com/2001/kk1230.html

http://www.kevinandkell.com/archive/boardwatch/kkbw200002.gi...

http://www.kevinandkell.com/2000/kk0730.html

http://www.kevinandkell.com/2003/kk1005.html

http://www.kevinandkell.com/2005/kk0515.html

http://onthefastrack.com/comics/december-9-2012/

http://onthefastrack.com/comics/january-8-2012/

http://onthefastrack.com/comics/may-4-2014/

http://onthefastrack.com/comics/january-4-2015/

http://onthefastrack.com/comics/january-18-2015/

http://onthefastrack.com/comics/april-14-2015/

And, more in line with what this article is about, Scott McCloud’s comic about Google Chrome: https://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/

Curious. How do you stay organized? Do you just happen also be interested in this topic and have a file with these links? Or do you have a good memory and googled away for the ones you found relevant?

It’s called “Bookmarks”, and is a feature present in all web browsers since time immemorial. :-)

And yes, I happen to be interested in good visual explanations of techical issues, so when I see one I bookmark it, so I can find it when I want to use it to explain something.

Maybe consider a note app. You or the website might not be connected to the Internet. I'd recommend Evernote if they didn't suck so much. Pocket had a chance too.

It's less necessary now that you have browser sync but I still use pinboard.in (basically a delicious-type site) to save bookmarks along with some comments.

xkcd deserves a mention, I'll pick this as my favourite:

https://xkcd.com/149/

In a previous century I learned to program using Roger Kaufman's "A FORTRAN Coloring Book". It uses a very similar technique (and style!). Here is a link to the internet archive: https://archive.org/stream/9780262610261

Blast from the past. I took his course. As I recall we actually had a mimeographed copy of the book although, now, I think I have the real book around somewhere. At the time, the joint computer facility still had an IBM 360 so you had to submit jobs via punch cards with very little CPU time leeway for coding errors or typos.

I credit 'A FORTRAN Coloring Book' with saving my first computing class, long, long ago. I bought it as a supplement to the textbook and lectures, as the lightbulb wasn't quite coming on for me through those. Among other things, the book taught me that getting a second perspective could sometimes be just what you need. I wound up acing the class... and finding a career. My copy sits in a place of honor on my bookshelf.

Chrysler did a similar thing many decades ago for its training: http://www.imperialclub.com/Repair/Lit/Films/index47.htm

I think to be effective in using cartoons for teaching, you have to make them entertaining and integrated, but also not be completely flippant --- and that depends on the reader, which is why it's not for everyone.

There's not a Wikipedia page for "visual metaphor", but there are pages for "visual rhetoric" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_rhetoric and "visual thinking" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_thinking

Negative space can be both meaningful and useful later on.

I learned about visual thinking and visual metaphor in application to business communications from "The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures" http://www.danroam.com/the-back-of-the-napkin/

It is a nice idea but some of those cartoons look very confusing and would be confusing to a novice. I think asking the user about themselves then finding a simile to explain the new thing is better.

It puts the effort on the teacher which is where it should be. Making things easy to draw doesn't bridge the gap of complexity.

> asking the user about themselves then finding a simile

I do this when in conversation, but how do you do this in broadcast?

One solution: Start off the sentence with describing the persona the reader can take on to ‘live’ through the example. “say your a stay at home dad with 4 kids running around but they all want to share the same toy, you enforce a round robin scheduling rule for the kids , they pass the toy around one after the other”... similarly when using technology foobaroo , apps sharing a resource etc...

Agree, I like the style but i don't really see these as very educational. The floating point comic which is being brought up as a good example does no explaining at all, it's just a bunch of random numbers and equations, why 2^52? where does that 52 enter the picture and how does it relate to the 64 bits from the first box? Why is +0.2 being rounded? Just showing the exponent/fraction division would have made it so much clearer.

Many of the comics have the same traits, they are cute or might be useful as cheat sheets if you already know the topic but can't really be used to teach someone about it.

For some good examples how to teach technical and mechanic concepts concerning maintenance check Out PS, The Preventive Maintenance Monthly. It's a series of US Army technical bulletins published since June 1951 as a monthly magazine with comic book-style art to illustrate proper preventive maintenance methods.

Comic Legend Will Eisner’s Work Influences Military Training http://www.military.com/video/off-duty/humor/comic-legend-wi...

Also check out the PS archives. It's one of Will Eisner's hidden gems.

http://dig.library.vcu.edu/cdm/landingpage/collection/psm

Reminds me of Starting FORTH by Leo Brody. There's an online version:

https://www.forth.com/starting-forth/

Nice blog.

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