When incorporating visual activities in a learning context, you can consider two approaches to make things easier for yourself, your students or team. Prompts and Practice. There has been a growing interest in “daily practice challenges”, since inktober kicked off in 2009. Creator Jake Parker wanted “a challenge to improve his inking skills and develop positive drawing habits”. The basic concept is one drawing a day for 30 days. One new prompt each day.
Many other such challenges and daily practice prompts have appeared on the scene, following a similar format, but changing the prompts to suit a specific audience. For educators wanting to to get students drawing, brainstorming and visualizing this can easily be adjusted to a course.
For those participating in the challenge, (or course) it answers one of the more confounding questions when working visually, “What should I draw?”
Over at lifelology.io they are picking up on this trend and directing it towards the #scicomm (Science Communication) community.
Lifeology is a platform and a community space that brings together scientists, health experts, artists, writers and broader audiences in the creation of mobile-friendly Lifeology mini-courses that can reach anyone.
They launched their event to coincide with inktober, and although I only completed 3 drawings that month, I still got to watch others share their creations as they approached the challenge in their own way. The prompts, as well as some simple instructions for sharing are all that are needed to run this activity, and it can be open to all.
You can check out my 3 submissions below.
My scicomm 2020 submissions
