Category: Student Posts

I’ve never been able to understand from borrowed notes. I feel they’re the most easiest form of understanding for the person who creates them and at the same time daunting for the readers to understand them. So, throughout my attempt to create this visual note, the only thing in mind was to be make it as simplistic as possible. 

This visual note is about a basic economic concept called ‘Opportunity Cost’. Since economics is a social science, my thought process while creating was aligned towards real life examples. Relating it to real life helped me connect the dots better, and now when I see the final product I think it turned out pretty well. I think it made me well versed in that concept. Minimum use of words brought more clarity and thus, making it more convenient to revise. Textual notes might just become my opportunity cost since, I’m going to go visual from now on. I’m glad that I got this assignment , because if not for it I would’ve never tried my hands on visual notes. 

These are notes from a recent class in my Linear Algebra course. Subspaces aren’t particularly hard to understand, but they form the foundation for most other advanced topics in Linear Algebra. Thus, (as we have been reminded several times by our professor) it is imperative to understand them extremely well.

Creating these visual notes helped me to understand and visualize concepts a lot better. In fact, since I had already studied this section, I tried to create these notes from memory as far as possible. This actually proved to be very effective because it allowed me to put forth my thoughts in a clear and (somewhat) organized manner. Initially, I thought this whole process would be time-consuming, and so it seemed definitively impractical and almost certainly impossible to create such notes for all my classes. However, this one page took me only about 30 minutes. This is the same amount of time I would probably take if I chose to revise the material by reading. Creating the notes not only made Math fun (not two words you hear in the same sentence every day), but also helped me to make these concepts almost intuitive– which is the goal with Math. It’s obviously a win-win situation, and I’m definitely going to try to make visual notes more frequently in the future.

This is a typical page from my Chemistry 150 class. It is pretty visualistic, as you often have to show how the atoms bond together or how the energy in orbitals work and hybridize. I didn’t have the means to do it digitally, but after looking at the many visual notes example, I started using two colors to write notes, so that I can locate a particular example or a topic quickly.

Creating these visual notes to display energy in a more creative way allowed to gain an understanding of the course content better because not only did I review the information by just rewriting it, I only organized the most important parts of the content into visually appealing notes, that I can readily check for my biology class. I made these visual notes beneficial for my biology course and my chemistry course due to overlapping content. I got to view the content of energy from a different perspective from my usually dull and chronological text notes. I discovered that I enjoy creating these visual notes and will continue to make these notes for content that I find more strenuous or challenging to grasp. I found it enjoyable to turn dull information into something visually appealing because it makes me not grow tired of reviewing the content.

For this side quest, I created visual notes from a day in my chemistry class. We were learning about hybridization and the overlap of orbitals (regions of space where electrons exist) in the formation of bonds within a molecule. My teacher did show images to represent orbitals as it is one of the learning objectives for our class, but I hadn’t drawn and took the time to understand this concept myself. Through these drawings, I was able to solidify the types of bonds created and ask myself how and where I can represent the different lobes of hybridized bonds. I really tried to focus on the drawing of these molecules and limit the number of words on the page.

I switched to virtual note-taking with GoodNotes 5 when this semester started, but I have never used it solely to draw pictures. I find it most helpful when I can write on worksheets and implement images from my textbook interspersed with my notes. I also try not to re-write my notes or create study guides as a studying method because I don’t find it as effective as creating flashcards. I do think my method works well, but this side quest opened my mind up to how to take advantage of my tools and implement drawings as part of my understanding. For example, when I was completing this assignment, I finally understood where the orbitals come from and found gaps in my learning that I don’t think I would have realized previously. In addition, drawing images is certainly more accessible with my tablet given that the app refines shapes and I have a multitude of colors and pen sizes. Previously, though, I would not turn to drawing because I would spend too much time drawing a doodle/diagram out as opposed to actually learning and applying the concept.