#1 Tennis Balls on Different Courts

I used the online platform—Piktochart—to create the infographic. I wanted to present the three types of tennis courts sorted by bounce level from highest to lowest and speed level from lowest to highest. But I couldn’t find a proper template for my design, so I created one from scratch. This is the refined version based on the constructive comments from my peers. I moved the text on top and made it a vertical bar instead of a horizontal one. Besides, I appended more textual information about the Grand Slam Tournaments at the bottom of the graphic.

According to Dunlap and Lowenthal (2016), “effective infographics rely primarily on visual elements and structure, as opposed to text, to convey content/messages.” So, it is essential to spend a considerable amount of time considering the design of visual elements and make sure they precisely express the instructional meaning to the learners.

This design is supposed to help readers understand the changing patterns among three types of the tennis court and help make connections and increase information retention. According to Balliett (2011), the graphics should not be used to “tell the story”; Instead, they should be used to show the data or information. Hence, I tried to use minimal text and graphics in the infographic to convey the instructional message.

#2 The Different Parts of a Tennis Racket

This infographic consisted of two elements: a public domain picture of a tennis racket and some graphics (shapes and lines) with textual labels. Referring to Mayer’s (2014) principles that contribute to reduced extraneous information, I designed the infographic in a straightforward way and avoided too much decoration that could be distracting and result in extraneous cognitive load (Coherence principle). Considering the signaling principle, I applied bold font to the three main elements on the left, which are considered more important, to be distinct from the elements on the right. Following the spatial contiguity principle, I put the textual labels right next to the corresponding elements, which aligns with Mayer’s principle for fostering generative processing.

#3 Tennis Grand Slam Milestones

This is a visual milestone for the Student Media Project. It supports learning in multiple ways. According to Boss and Krauss (2014), “…students’ attention to time management will be better if you share a project calendar that makes deadlines visual … a good project calendar will help students see the deadlines of upcoming milestones so they can manage their plan ahead, track their progress, and troubleshoot potential delays before they fall behind” (p. 132). It also helps “‘chunk’ the work into manageable parts and help students pace their efforts” (p. 112). Students will have a general perception of the project and plan their teamwork based on the milestone. Moreover, the visual milestone check-ins help students get instant feedback and support from teachers, and teachers could also monitor students’ progress and provide extra assistance when necessary. I used Piktochart and their pre-made template to create the visual milestone.

This video is made with multiple tools, including Canva and Adobe Premiere Pro. The intro and outro video were designed with a copy-right free video and audio repository offered by Canva. I used the text motion template provided by Adobe. I segmented the instructional video into seven steps that foster essential processing management for learners (Mayer, 2014) via adding the text motions in the video. The video is a medium close-up with its only focus on the tennis racket wrapping, and it reduced extraneous information that stunts essential processing. Learners can follow the video to achieve the learning outcome with video controls like pause, rewind and playback speed. Also, the caption is available for people in need, which increases the accessibility of the media.