Infographics are: fun, informative, inspiring, thought-provoking, knowledge-enhancing, stimulating and above all, engaging. If you don’t know what an infographic is, it’s the fusion of graphic design, with data handling. An infographic takes some data and turns it into an attractive poster which uses a variety of data representation techniques to communicate the message that emerges from the data.

A nice example is the infographic below that compares the size of historic volcanic eruptions with the number of fatalities caused.

Click on the image to see it full-size. Image taken from http://awesome.good.is/transparency/ web/1006/biggest-volcanoes/flat.html

For a rich resource of infographics visit the good.is website by clicking here. There are many new ones added each week.

I believe the use of infographics within teaching maths to be a great way to approach a data handling topic. You could spend an entire lesson interpreting this infographic to ascertain knowledge about our water consumption or interpreting this infographic to see the impact we are having on fish stocks in the sea.

I’ve blogged in a previous post about this fantastic Facebook infographic that looks at users’ habits. I particularly like this one as it is relavant to the pupils and also uses lots of different data representation techniques.

Getting your pupils to produce an infographic gives an attractive alternative to ‘draw me a pie chart showing what different hobbies people have in the class’. I think the key to getting good infographics from the pupils is engaging them with good ones in the interpretation lesson so they know what they are aiming at.

If you find any good particularly good infographics to use, or data sets from which to produce them, please post links to them in the comments section below.

Enjoy!