Teaching Information Design in Public Schools

It has bothered me for a long time that schools spend so little time and energy teaching students how to organize information in meaningful ways. I recently attended the Science Fair at my children’s school and was impressed by the creativity of the experiments, and disgusted by the presentation of most of them. Information was displayed with no sense of organization, and the judges appeared to pay much more attention to the visual style of the presentations than to the content.

Obviously (as you’ve noted) having students create PowerPoint presentations instead of writing papers only exacerbates this problem. Is there any hope? Any chance of you writing a book specifically for elementary school educators? Or doing a series of seminars for them?

If you don’t have any ideas on how we can change the schools, how about an idea of what I can do as a parent to help my kids understand and utilize good information design.