
How to teach technical concepts with cartoons - Tomte
https://jvns.ca/teach-tech-with-cartoons/
======
klenwell
I worked with an analyst a few years ago. I'll call her Alice. Alice wasn't
very good at her job. She was ok and could get stuff done with sufficient
hand-holding. The problem was she was really insecure.

Alice worried that she wasn't smart enough or experienced enough in this
particular industry to do her job. She was. But she had the air of someone who
was always worried about being found out. So instead of talking with the
managers or users that she should have been talking to to get her work done,
she would go to people she trusted, like me, who liked to be helpful when they
could and who, as a developer or someone who had been with the company a
while, might know a little something of how what she was asking about worked,
but probably shouldn't have been the person she was talking to. This annoyed a
lot of people.

What she was really good at was decorating her cubicle. She was a genius at
it. She would do it for every major holiday and even some of the minor ones.

Alice's boss liked to gripe about her to me. She hadn't hired Alice, didn't
really like her, and didn't offer her much support.

We had a lot of arcane business processes. I thought it would be nice if we
could throw some light on these, maybe come up with some charts or creative
visualizations that could serve as a general reference. Cartoons like this
would have have been great.

One year, around Halloween, when the company sponsored a cubicle-decorating
contest with prizes, Alice's boss was complaining to me about how much effort
Alice had put into decorating her cubicle. It was impressive. She had turned
it into a little haunted house.

I suggested to Alice's boss maybe trying to leverage Alice's cubicle-
decorating skills to visualize some of these business processes and workflows.

A few weeks later Alice was laid off.

~~~
forkerenok
What's the moral of the story?

~~~
justinpombrio
I see you aren't familiar with the works of Franz Kafka.

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louprado
Forest M. Mims III was a master at using cartoons in his electrical
engineering books. Just look at the happy and sad lightbulbs on page 1 of
_Getting Started in Electronics_ [1].

Using cartoons a great way to disarm the reader, especially children, into
believing the subject matter will be understandable. I don't know if Mims used
cartoons to make engineering appeal to children, but it certainly had that
affect on me.

[1][http://www.flickriver.com/photos/mightyohm/tags/forrestmmims...](http://www.flickriver.com/photos/mightyohm/tags/forrestmmims/)

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teddyh
Some of my favorite comics about technical topics:

[http://dilbert.com/strip/2000-03-19](http://dilbert.com/strip/2000-03-19)

[http://www.kevinandkell.com/2000/kk1029.html](http://www.kevinandkell.com/2000/kk1029.html)

[http://www.kevinandkell.com/2001/kk1230.html](http://www.kevinandkell.com/2001/kk1230.html)

[http://www.kevinandkell.com/archive/boardwatch/kkbw200002.gi...](http://www.kevinandkell.com/archive/boardwatch/kkbw200002.gif)

[http://www.kevinandkell.com/2000/kk0730.html](http://www.kevinandkell.com/2000/kk0730.html)

[http://www.kevinandkell.com/2003/kk1005.html](http://www.kevinandkell.com/2003/kk1005.html)

[http://www.kevinandkell.com/2005/kk0515.html](http://www.kevinandkell.com/2005/kk0515.html)

[http://onthefastrack.com/comics/december-9-2012/](http://onthefastrack.com/comics/december-9-2012/)

[http://onthefastrack.com/comics/january-8-2012/](http://onthefastrack.com/comics/january-8-2012/)

[http://onthefastrack.com/comics/may-4-2014/](http://onthefastrack.com/comics/may-4-2014/)

[http://onthefastrack.com/comics/january-4-2015/](http://onthefastrack.com/comics/january-4-2015/)

[http://onthefastrack.com/comics/january-18-2015/](http://onthefastrack.com/comics/january-18-2015/)

[http://onthefastrack.com/comics/april-14-2015/](http://onthefastrack.com/comics/april-14-2015/)

And, more in line with what this article is about, Scott McCloud’s comic about
Google Chrome:
[https://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/](https://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/)

~~~
newbear
Curious. How do you stay organized? Do you just happen also be interested in
this topic and have a file with these links? Or do you have a good memory and
googled away for the ones you found relevant?

~~~
teddyh
It’s called “ _Bookmarks_ ”, and is a feature present in all web browsers
since time immemorial. :-)

And yes, I happen to be interested in good visual explanations of techical
issues, so when I see one I bookmark it, so I can find it when I want to use
it to explain something.

~~~
jiggunjer
Maybe consider a note app. You or the website might not be connected to the
Internet. I'd recommend Evernote if they didn't suck so much. Pocket had a
chance too.

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raoulr
In a previous century I learned to program using Roger Kaufman's "A FORTRAN
Coloring Book". It uses a very similar technique (and style!). Here is a link
to the internet archive:
[https://archive.org/stream/9780262610261](https://archive.org/stream/9780262610261)

~~~
ghaff
Blast from the past. I took his course. As I recall we actually had a
mimeographed copy of the book although, now, I think I have the real book
around somewhere. At the time, the joint computer facility still had an IBM
360 so you had to submit jobs via punch cards with very little CPU time leeway
for coding errors or typos.

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userbinator
Chrysler did a similar thing many decades ago for its training:
[http://www.imperialclub.com/Repair/Lit/Films/index47.htm](http://www.imperialclub.com/Repair/Lit/Films/index47.htm)

I think to be effective in using cartoons for teaching, you have to make them
entertaining and integrated, but also not be completely flippant --- and that
depends on the reader, which is why it's not for everyone.

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westurner
There's not a Wikipedia page for "visual metaphor", but there are pages for
"visual rhetoric"
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_rhetoric](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_rhetoric)
and "visual thinking"
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_thinking](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_thinking)

Negative space can be both meaningful and useful later on.

I learned about visual thinking and visual metaphor in application to business
communications from "The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling
Ideas with Pictures" [http://www.danroam.com/the-back-of-the-
napkin/](http://www.danroam.com/the-back-of-the-napkin/)

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thomk
It is a nice idea but some of those cartoons look very confusing and would be
confusing to a novice. I think asking the user about themselves then finding a
simile to explain the new thing is better.

It puts the effort on the teacher which is where it should be. Making things
easy to draw doesn't bridge the gap of complexity.

~~~
afarrell
> asking the user about themselves then finding a simile

I do this when in conversation, but how do you do this in broadcast?

~~~
abledon
One solution: Start off the sentence with describing the persona the reader
can take on to ‘live’ through the example. “say your a stay at home dad with 4
kids running around but they all want to share the same toy, you enforce a
round robin scheduling rule for the kids , they pass the toy around one after
the other”... similarly when using technology foobaroo , apps sharing a
resource etc...

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CapTVK
For some good examples how to teach technical and mechanic concepts concerning
maintenance check Out PS, The Preventive Maintenance Monthly. It's a series of
US Army technical bulletins published since June 1951 as a monthly magazine
with comic book-style art to illustrate proper preventive maintenance methods.

Comic Legend Will Eisner’s Work Influences Military Training
[http://www.military.com/video/off-duty/humor/comic-legend-
wi...](http://www.military.com/video/off-duty/humor/comic-legend-will-eisners-
work-influences-military-training/5374039482001)

Also check out the PS archives. It's one of Will Eisner's hidden gems.

[http://dig.library.vcu.edu/cdm/landingpage/collection/psm](http://dig.library.vcu.edu/cdm/landingpage/collection/psm)

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jonsen
Reminds me of Starting FORTH by Leo Brody. There's an online version:

[https://www.forth.com/starting-forth/](https://www.forth.com/starting-forth/)

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davidzweig
Nice blog.

