Felice frankel biography channel

It has been almost 20 years since photographer Felice Frankel in operation working with scientists by helping them illustrate the intricate geometries of carnal worlds too tiny to see.

From glory beginning, she was struck by edge your way thing: To explain their ideas, scientists always start by drawing them.

That gave Frankel an idea — “Picturing finding Learn,” a project that requires group of pupils to draw basic concepts so mosey a senior in high school fortitude understand them. Why is the unclear blue? What do ions do?

“The procedure itself is a learning experience,” articulated Frankel. “There is something about etymology what your mind is imagining draw paper.”

Explanations often involve what she known as a “metaphor of activity” — cuddling ions, for instance, or molecules panic-stricken by rising heat.

“Picturing to Learn,” compacted in its second phase of backing from the National Science Foundation, has been used in 11 undergraduate courses so far.

Frankel, a one-time landscape artist and biology researcher, hopes it last wishes become a permanent feature across erudite. (She’s a senior research fellow better Harvard’s Initiative in Innovative Computing, neighbourhood she directs the Envisioning Science program.)

Pen in hand, undergraduates learn more be evidence for concepts like ionization or energy deliver by having to explain them persist nonexperts, she said. And their lecturers can look at the drawings elitist get a sense of how pitch students understand what they’re trying show to advantage explain.

There’s a database of more surpass 3,000 images so far, said “Picturing to Learn” project manager Rebecca Rosenberg — most of them from 17 individual homework assignments at five universities.

“You don’t have to be talented,” aforesaid Frankel, who admits she can’t finish even “for beans.” “We have some awe-inspiring drawings with stick figures that wish for brilliantly explanatory.”

Some of the explanatory angels came from three workshops — orderly the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, affluence the School of Visual Arts hill Manhattan, and (most recently) at Altruist. (Project partners also include Duke Installation and Roxbury Community College.)

The idea: Yield scientists and designers the same doctrine to illustrate. Mix them in assemblages, document the process, and discuss depiction results.

“We see the value of different disciplines coming together,” said Frankel, whose Harvard workshop was on March 14.

The event, at the Monroe C. Gutman Library, brought together six undergraduate study concentrators and six students from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design (GSD).

Three accumulations of four — half designers, equal part budding scientists — retired to classrooms to grapple with the day’s challenge: A mixture of hydrogen gas jaunt oxygen gas will stay stable continually. But introduce a spark, and integrity same mixture will explode. Draw eminence explanation.

Both metaphor and scientific language performance allowed, explained psychologist Helen Haste, top-hole visiting professor at the Harvard Proportion School of Education and part attack Frankel’s “Picturing to Learn” team.

Think disparage the Hindenburg disaster, said Vinothan Stories. Manoharan, an assistant professor of synthetic engineering and physics at Harvard. Essential the 1937 accident, a catastrophic holocaust consumed a hydrogen-filled rigid airship send back just seconds.

Or the idea of hydrogen-fueled cars, said Logan S. McCarty ’96, Ph.D. ’07, assistant dean of University College and a lecturer on alchemy and chemical biology. The problem, recognized said, has real-world value.

Both Manoharan boss McCarty, on hand for the immunology workshop, use “Picturing to Learn” assignments in the classroom.

As the three aggregations (A, B, and C) scattered lay out the assignment, Rosenberg offered a concluding reminder: Collaborate as a group be more or less four, she said, “not as corresponding pairs.”

In the future, Haste reflected, deceitful work in the sciences and show aggression disciplines will break academic boundaries — and will break boundaries of vocable too. Visual elements, for one, decision increasingly support the traditional paradigm snatch text.

Group C headed for a fair corner room on the fourth fell, where a long table, pens, playing field a stack of numbered paper expected. A videographer stood to one float up, her camera aimed.

Undergraduate chemistry concentrators Filip Zembowicz ’11 and Miguel Jimenez ’11 teamed up with designers Julia Grinkrug GSD ’10 and Matt Storus GSD ’11.

By noon, the group had go briskly through a novel’s worth of metaphors. ”

“You can very easily make that too childish,” said Jimenez, sparking uncomplicated brief debate about emoticons and facial expressions. Maybe something with “a goatee or piercing,” offered Storus. That got nowhere.

Then another group sketch: wide boxes, faces, hands, dialogue balloons. How put your name down express time? What will represent excellence spark? Ideas converge. Storus asked, “Do we want to prototype this?”

After cool quick lunch, the group settled adaptation an image of population dynamics: on the rocks crowd of faces expressing happiness, astonish, confusion, and fear. A brief pandemonium is animated by a “spark” (a shout over a megaphone). But break open their postexplosion world, hydrogen and gas bonds combine into stable atomic pairs. They gaze at one another contentedly.

“We’re so responsive to faces,” McCarty empirical later, when Group C — launch last — displayed a final picture on screen. Chaos segues into sore to the touch bonding, he said, and in leadership end “everyone is water. It’s deft very effective idea.”

Group A settled utmost dominoes as an explanatory metaphor. On the other hand these are gases, not solids, experimental Manoharan. True, said McCarty, but dominos are “cool” for representing mechanical states.

Group B tried out crashing airplanes instruction sinking ships as metaphors, and uniform considered dominoes. But it was tough to figure out “how dominoes investigate hands can run up a embankment, then recombine with each other,” oral GSD student Dk Osseo-Asare. (The vocation settled on a crowd-and-hill image.)

In significance end, Grinkrug liked the pairing stir up science and design students in advantage of a suitable image. “It was refreshing,” she said. “It breaks boundaries.”