Moving from Visualization for Teaching to Visualization for Learning

Good teachers choose from a rich set of visualizations to clearly communicate ideas and concepts to students. Good educational visualizations are designed in a way that supports the teaching process: they help to tell a story that leads to understanding.

In this paper, we argue that teachers should not produce such visualizations. Instead, they should ask their students to do that. We argue that creating a concise visualization is an excellent opportunity to gain a profound understanding of a concept or skill. Visualizing implies learning! Thus, we advocate the development of pedagogical methods and tools that enable students to learn by producing visualizations.