Fostering Creative Visualisation Skills Through Data-Art Exhibitions

TL;DR

This paper explores how data-art exhibitions can enhance students' creative visualization skills by providing real-world, public presentation opportunities that bridge classroom learning and professional practice.

Contribution

It presents an implementation of a data-art exhibition within a computing curriculum and evaluates its impact on student creativity and technical skills.

Findings

Improved student engagement and creativity.

Enhanced technical proficiency in data visualization.

Positive feedback from students and educators.

Abstract

Data-art exhibitions offer a unique and real-world setting to foster creative visualisation skills among students. They serve as real-world platform for students to display their work, bridging the gap between classroom learning and professional practice. Students must develop a technical solution, grasp the context, and produce work that is appropriate for public presentation. This scenario helps to encourage innovative thinking, engagement with the topic, and helps to enhance technical proficiency. We present our implementation of a data-art exhibition within a computing curriculum, for third-year degree-level students. Students create art-based visualisations from selected datasets and present their work in a public exhibition. We have used this initiative over the course of two academic years with different cohorts, and reflect on its impact on student learning and creativity.