If you have been following me for any length of time, you'll know that I love using visuals for learning and especially infographics. I think images and infographics are a great tool for communicating information and concepts in a simple way and so great for use in the classroom. One of my favourite sources of image explanations is Sketchplanations, which you can find on Substack at: https://sketchplanations.substack.com/
These small sketches explain concepts in a simple visual way which is great for learners and they can be the basis of classroom discussion.
This week I spotted one on Murphy's Law - https://sketchplanations.substack.com/p/murphys-law
If you don't know what Murphy's Law is, have a look.
There's also a great explanation of the origin of Murphy's Law, which may or may note be true.
How to use it:
- Show students the image and ask them if they agree with this law.
- Give students a topic and get them to brainstorm all the things that could go wrong, e.g. Going on holiday, meeting someone on a first date, a job interview, taking a road trip, picking someone up at the airport, etc.
- Then they could discuss what they could do to make sure these things didn't happen. This is actually a pretty useful life skill too.
- With higher level students you could use the text and get them to read the origin and decide whether they think it's true. You could also get them to design Sketchplanations and background stories of own stories for other laws such as The Peter Principle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle or Occam's Razor Law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor
There are lots of other great Sketchplanations and you can subscribe to get them through your email each time a new one is added.
Here are some really useful ones:
- Equity vs Equality: https://sketchplanations.com/equality-and-equity
- Halon's Razor: https://sketchplanations.com/hanlons-razor
- Halfalogue: https://sketchplanations.com/halfalogue
- The Trust Equation: https://sketchplanations.com/the-trust-equation
- Group Think: https://sketchplanations.com/groupthink
If you'd like to learn more about using visuals like these check out my book Exploiting Infographics
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