Infoviz Education: Animated Visualizations for Kids

Helium, carbon, and what Little Red Riding Hood has to do with malnutrition in Africa.

We love infographics. We love animation. And we’re all for engaging kids in creative education. So today we’re looking at three educational infoviz animations that shed light on complex or important issues in beautifully art-directed ways that make little eyes widen and little brains broaden.

HOW TO FEED THE WORLD

Directed by Denis van Waerebeke, How To Feed The World is a brilliant animated short film made for the Bon appétit exhibition in Paris science museum. Though aimed at helping kids ages 9 to 14 understand the science behind eating and why nutrition is important, the film’s slick animation style and seamless visual narrative make it as educational for kids as it is for budding designers, looking to master the art of using design as a storytelling medium.

Bonus points for the obligatory British voiceover, always a delightful upgrade.

THE STORY OF STUFF

Though not necessarily aimed at kids alone, Annie Leonard’s brilliant The Story of Stuff — which we reviewed extensively some time ago — condenses the entire materials economy into 20 minutes of wonderfully illustrated and engagingly narrated storytelling that makes you never look at stuff the same way again.

The Story of Stuff recently got a book deal, further attesting to its all-around excellence. We highly recommend it.

THE ELEMENTS

A few months ago, we reviewed They Might Be Giants’ fantastic Here Comes Science 2-disc CD/DVD album aimed at the K-5 set, a brilliant intersection of entertainment and creative education. One of the highlights on it is this wonderful animated journey across the periodic table, a true exercise in art-meets-science.

The entire album is well worth the two Starbucks lattes that it costs, both as a tool of inspired education for kids and a timeless music treat for indie rock fans of all ages.

BONUS

Though certainly not educational, and likely not aimed at kids, this fantastic animation — which we featured exactly a year ago today — offers a brilliant infographic reinterpretation of the Brothers Grimm children’s classic The Little Red Riding Hood, inspired by Röyksopp’s Remind Me.

We’d love to see this as a series, celebrating the cross-pollination of some of our favorite facets of creative culture — animation, data visualization, and classic children’s literature — with quirk, humor and superb art direction.

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Phylomon: The Game of Life

Pokemon meets Mother Earth, or what preschoolers have to do with the life of life.

The UN has declared 2010 the International Year of Biodiversity. And while we’ve seen a number of smart, ambitious scientific and creative efforts inspired by and advocating nature’s bounty, the fact remains that preserving the incredible natural variety of species is in the hands of the future generations. So raising children with a biological sensibility and getting them excited about biodiversity is at the root of any viable effort.

Which is why we love the understatedly brilliant Phylomon project by The Science Creative Quarterly, a wonderful repository for well-written, unconventional scientific literature.

When you have seen one ant, one bird, one tree, you have not seen them all. ~ E. O. Wilson.

Phylomon is a web-based initiative for creating Pokemon-like cards, using real creatures and nature’s own “character design” genius. The project was inspired by a recent study that found young children have the remarkable ability to identify and characterize more than 120 different Pokemon characters, but fail to name more than half of common wildlife species. So Phylomon has set out to broaden children’s natural characters vocabulary, drawing inspiration from the clearly successful model used by “synthetic characters” like Pokemon.

Submissions will be crowdsourced from a variety of creatives, with the scientific community weighing in on the content, game designers invited to brainstorm innovative ways of using the cards, and teachers participating to evaluate the educational merit of the cards.

Best of all, the hope is that this will all occur in a non-commercial-open-access-open-source-because-basically-this-is-good-for-you-your-children-and-your-planet sort of way.

Because Phylomon depends so heavily on the creative community’s contributions, we urge you to submit yours. Use this Flickr pool if you’re a designer or illustrator, this one if you’re a photographer, or this one if you come from the education community.

And if you still have doubts about the momentous importance of biodiversity, take it from Ban Ki-moon, the UNSYG himself — it’s important, alright.

Read up on Phylomon and contribute — why not?

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The School of Continuing Education

Five outposts for ongoing learning, or how to master French cuisine, rock music, and sailing at your leisure.

People crave information — you’re reading this, aren’t you? And the fundamental human drive to seek out more and more knowledge has only grown since ur times. We’re still blown away by the recently mentioned 34-gigabytes-of-data-per-day diet of the average American.

One area where we’re really excited about the possibilities of on-demand data delivery is education. (Excitement we’ve voiced in a recent contribution to GOOD Magazine.) Whether it’s using online media to organize collective learning in the analog world, or the classes themselves take place online, the Internet enables people to seek out and receive education in ways they never could have before. These opportunities for lifelong learning take advantage of simple supply-and-demand economics — those who want to learn finding those who want to teach — for every conceivable subject, and then some. (Shoe Shining 101, we’re looking at you.)

Here, then, are five examples of extension-style schooling that can change the way we think about acquiring knowledge.

UNIVERSITY OF THE PEOPLE

The first tuition-free global education with real academic cred, University of the People was founded by e-learning entrepreneur Shai Reshef with the developing world in mind. It may not have the brick-and-mortar facades of McKim, Mead, and White but that’s precisely its point; thanks to open-source courseware and without the need for endowments, the University can focus on delivering degrees at the lowest cost possible. Requirements for attendance include a high school degree, fluency in English, and an admissions fee of $15 to $50 on a sliding scale depending on a student’s country of origin.

University of the People‘s first class of 178 students representing 49 countries enrolled in its grand educational experiment in fall of 2009. While the University’s results are as up in the air as its curriculum, we’re optimistic about what this virtual institution heralds for the future.

(UN)CLASSES

The product of LaidOffCamp, a BarCamp-style event for unemployed New Yorkers, (un)classes offered its first class in March of 2009. (It was “How to be a digital nomad,” a course on sustaining an itinerant lifestyle while still holding jobs.)

To set up an unclass, you register with the site and then create a new course listing, either as a prospective student or as an instructor. Other people in your area interested in the same topic can join in, and since the process is self-organizing, the group determines when and where to meet. Most unclasses are one-off experiences, since the site bills itself as casual learning for people “who have hectic lives and struggle to find fun and interesting ways to satisfy their intellectual curiosity in the limited free time they have. Think of it as educational snacking, a low-touch way to explore topics that interest you.”

(un)classes has built a base around major cities in the Americas from Bahru to Vancouver (with a strong skew toward California), offering a range of un-course options from Ayurvedic cooking to Zen meditation.

SKILLSHARES

With its roots in DIY, craft, and hacking culture, Skillsharing has gained adherents during the current recession as a way to acquire new skills without dropping a lot of dough. Volunteers donate their time and talents to organize a weekend of events that share a distinctly makers’ faire flavor; many of the offerings involve bartering and tinkering, whether with kombucha or Wii remotes.

At a recent Skillshare event in In addition to Brooklyn, participants chose from a session listing that included hands-on workshops in bicycle repair and screenprinting (above, respectively). Other major Skillshares exist in Austin and Boston, and we bet there are more — let us know in the comments if you’ve shared your skills elsewhere.

SUPERCOOL SCHOOL

Supercool School bears the tagline “Start your own online school,” and while it doesn’t provide physical materials, it does come with a host of virtual tools you’d want to create and customize an educational experience. The e-learning startup is based in Berlin, San Francisco, and St. Petersburg, where its founders are located.

Once you sign up to start your own school, you can choose between a free hosted version, which accommodates 15 students, or subscribe to access Supercool School‘s more robust suite of media options. (There’s also an enterprise-level service for heavy-hitting educators who really want to have more control over their online learning environment.)

Just think — where individuals and small collectives once had to raise extensive funds as endowments, they can now open a school with a series of mouse clicks. Perhaps the future of the Internet holds more than LOLcats after all.

SCHOOL OF EVERYTHING

With big-time investors like Channel 4 and Esther Dyson, and unique monthly site visits in the hundreds of thousands, the UK-based School of Everything is strongly positioned as a cross between a networking platform like Meetup.com and the online classifieds behemoth Craigslist.

A marketplace for learning opportunities, the School of Everything lets you browse by location or topic, and then register your interest in either learning or teaching. Instructors have the option of charging for lessons, so the site lends itself to the kinds of listings you were likely to see tacked to bulletin boards in earlier years, with a strong showing in arts instruction and tutoring topics. School of Everything recently received a contract from the British government to grow domestically, bringing more of everything to those who want to learn it.

We know that these five initiatives are but a sliver of today’s e-enabled education landscape. If this post has tickled your passion for lifelong learning, you might enjoy one of our favorite websites, Open Culture — a fantastic compendium of free and low-cost learning opportunities.

Just don’t blame us when you emerge hours later, bleary eyed but much stronger on the fundamentals of biology.

Kirstin Butler has a Bachelor’s in art & architectural history and a Master’s in public policy from Harvard University. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn as a freelance editor and researcher, where she also spends way too much time on Twitter. For more of her thoughts, check out her videoblog.

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Pencils of Promise: Grassroots School-Building

How to give and own at the same time, or why Facebook is the new Peace Core.

In an ideal world, an invisible hand would be balancing the supply-demand ratio of help for humanity’s problems. The world, however, is far from ideal and we’re faced with more challenges than help is readily available for. And when help does present itself, it’s mostly in the form of donations — which often lack the immediacy of more hands-on approaches that give the help-giver a sense of ownership over the problem, in turn infecting the helpee with this we-can-solve-it resolve and unleashing a chain reaction of empowerment.

That’s exactly the kind of thinking that inspired Pencils of Promise — a powerful grassroots movement that seeks to solve the global education crisis from the bottom up and inside out. The nonprofit is 100% volunteer and its primary goal is to build schools and related facilites across the developing world, but it also embodies something we celebrate here at Brain Pickings — the cross-pollination of skills and perspectives — by empowering people to contribute whatever they are best at and cover different facets of the problem, rather than merely making impersonal and distanced donations.

The project began in 2008, when founder Adam Braun, fresh out of college himself, set out to build a single school in Laos. He put $25 into a bank account and asked friends to contribute however much they could. Little did he anticipate that in a little over a year, they would’ve raised $200,000 through the donations of thousands of individuals and over 150 volunteers would’ve joined the movement.

Our biggest commitment is to sustainability, which means PoP schools aren’t gifted but instead created by the community itself. The entire village helps builds their own school, leading to true ownership and a lasting commitment to their children’s educational future. ~ Adam Braun, Founder, Executive Director

Granted, as much as we’d want to, not all of us can drop our responsibilities and head East to build schools. But here’s how you can help:

Last December, Pencils of Promise won $25,000 through the Chase Community Giving Campaign on Facebook, which made them eligible for the million-dollar grand grant. And because the competition is user-driven, your vote can help tip the scale in the winning direction.

To sweeten the deal, Pencils of Promise is also using a voting system to decide which country to build schools in next — a little something they call “democratic social giving.” And in light of last week’s Haiti colossal earthquake disaster, PoP have just vouched to donate at least $100,000 towards youth-oriented initiatives in Haiti if they win the $1MM grant — a massive gesture of karmic kindness.

So go ahead and cast your vote for PoP in the Chase competition before Friday, when the voting closes — it’s a small effort on your part that can have momentous impact on entire communities. Which certainly beats another mindless round of FarmVille.

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