Project Rainbow

Description of impact

Development and publication of a suite of bilingual (English/Welsh) introduction to programming learning activities, around the topic of colours, lights and rainbows, focusing on computer graphics.

Impact Summary for the General Public

The learning activities are publicly available. The activities incrementally take people through learning about colour, rainbows, planning what to program, design and strategies to create colourful pictures using simple computer graphics principles based in the computer graphics programming library processing.org. The activities are freely available for the public to use, and have been created by several academics.

Description of the underpinning research

Visual computing is researched at Bangor University by many researchers. There are several academic works that underpin this content. The sketched design methodology, Five Design-Sheets, was invented by academics at Bangor University, initially published in 2011, and then in 2016 as a journal of Transactions on Visualisation and Computer Graphics, and in 2017 as a book by Springer. The Explanatory Visualisation Framework (EVF) also involving several academics, draws together aspects of visualisation, explanation and education. Drawing on, and from aspects of research in visualisation, computer graphics research, computer graphics teaching, leading of and chairing international computer graphics conferences (e.g., Eurographics 2011), helped to underpin and deliver Project Rainbow. In addition, some of the activities use the Critical Thinking Sheets (CTS) method. This is a strategy, which uses one sheet of paper, to lead learners to critically think about how to plan and outline the code that they will make.

ROBERTS J. C., HEADLEAND C., RITSOS P. D.: Sketching designs using the five design-sheet methodology. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics 22, 1 (Jan 2016), 419–428. doi: 10.1109/TVCG.2015.2467271

ROBERTS J. C., HEADLEAND C. J., RITSOS P. D.: Five Design-Sheets – Creative design and sketching in Computing and Viualization. Springer International Publishing, 2017. doi:10.1007/ 978- 3- 319- 55627- 7.

ROBERTS J. C., RITSOS P. D.: Critical thinking sheets: Encouraging critical thought and sketched implementation design. In EduCHI 2019 Symposium: Global Perspectives on HCI Education, CHI Confer- ence on Human Factors in Computing Systems (ACM CHI 2019) (2019).

ROBERTS J. C., RITSOS P. D.: Critical Thinking Sheet (CTS) for Design Thinking in Programming Courses. In Eurographics 2020 - Ed- ucation Papers (2020), Romero M., Sousa Santos B., (Eds.), The Euro- graphics Association, pp. 17–23. doi:10.2312/eged.20201029.

ROBERTS J. C., AL-MANEEA H., BUTCHER P. W. S., LEW R., REES G., SHARMA N., FRANKENBERG-GARCIA A.: Multiple views: different meanings and collocated words. Computer Graphics Forum 38, 3 (2019), 79–93. doi:https://doi.org/10.1111/cgf.13673.

ROBERTS J. C., BUTCHER P., SHERLOCK A., NASON S.: Explanatory journeys: Visualising to understand and explain administrative justice paths of redress. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (2021). Accepted/In press. URL: http: //arxiv.org/abs/2107.14013.

ROBERTS J. C., RITSOS P. D., HEADLEAND C.: Experience and Guidance for the use of Sketching and low-fidelity Visualisation- design in teaching. In Pedagogy of Data Visualization Workshop, IEEE Conference on Visualization (VIS), Phoenix, Arizona, USA (Oct. 2017), Joshi A., Adar E., Bertini E., Engle S., Hearst M., Keefe D., (Eds.).

ROBERTS J. C., RITSOS P. D., JACKSON J. R., HEADLEAND C.: The explanatory visualization framework: An active learning framework for teaching creative computing using explanatory visualizations. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics 24, 1 (2018), 791–801. doi:10.1109/TVCG.2017.2745878.

ROBERTS J. C., RITSOS P. D., KUNCHEVA L., VIDAL F., LIM I. S., AP CENYDD L., TEAHAN W., MANSOOR S., GRAY C., PERKINS D.: Visualisation Data Modelling Graphics (VDMG) at Ban- gor. In Research labs and projects: Eurographics 2021: the 42nd Annual Conference of the European Association for Computer Graphics (2021).

Beneficiaries and reach of impact

The public benefit, from having a suite of freely available introduction to computing and programming activities. International reach. With participants coming from the top five countries of Australia, United States, UK, India and Canada.

Impact status	Ongoing
Impact date	Jun 2020
Category of impact	Technological, Societal
Impact level	Engagement