Let’s Play: Design Games and Other Strategies for Introducing Visualization through Active Learning

Active learning provides an engaging alternative to the typical onesided lecture in which students passively listen to the instructor. In this paper, I discuss a collection of active learning strategies for designing a course in Information Visualization. The primary strategy, design games, consists of a goal-oriented session during class in which students are given a task and directed to solve the task independently or in teams. Design games challenge students to come up with novel solutions for applying the material of the course to realworld situations. Secondary strategies provide additional support for active learning in the classroom through a combination of group projects and in-class presentations. I present lessons learned from applying these strategies to an undergraduate upper-level course in Information Visualization, and discuss perceived benefits and practical challenges for this approach.