Assignment E:
For the previous assignment I wanted to teach people how to make brigadeiros and how to turn line drawings into digital illustrations. I attempted both these things via a blog post on Wix. I think that from the start I might've made my job a little harder than it needed to be in an attempt to maximize time. I was also rather ambitious in the things I wanted to teach because they both require several steps.
I needed to make the brigadeiros for a get-together with some colleagues who asked if I could bring them and that's why I decided to teach that since I was already making them. However, I was making three different kinds / flavors and I thought "why not include all three?". In retrospect my job could've been easier if I had just stuck to one in my instructions. I started by making the post for those because I was making them way ahead of time.
As I went along I sometimes got into the groove of things and forgot to document a couple of minor things that turns out didn't really need to be included in the end. But I tried as best as I could to take pictures and video of everything for consistency, texture and size reference.
In general, my instructions followed my work process / flow while making these. I wrote the instructions thinking people would be making all three flavors at the same time. So the instructions were set up as: first the base, then the flavors then the toppings all at the end. Turns out many people only tried making the first recipe and they found that having the topping instructions at the end was unnecessary. They prefered to have the toppings following the recipe they were making. there were other things I took into account, like having the ingredients in the same order you were going to use them, and repeating the measurements within the instructions so people don't have to go up to see quantities.
I got feedback from people experienced in the kitchen as well as people that don't regularly cook. The best feedback came from the people that have cooked before with small adjustments (like give suggestions for people that don't have a food processor or microwave and the suggestion to put the toppings along with each recipe).
For the instructions I was working on the premise that the person reading really had never tried to make anything so I tried to add a lot of detail to them and picture of every step to assure them that what they were doing was correct. However, some people felt that it was unnecessary (e.g. "I know how to melt butter"). Except that depending on what you're making the degree to which you melt / cook the butter is important and you wouldn't know this unless you had tried baking or making candy before. This got me thinking that perhaps more explanation was needed as to WHY I was including all these details. I was trying to avoid those giant and really long explanations in recipes that are usually just annoying and people end up skipping anyway.
In the end I felt that this was the most successful of my experiments and the reason for this is because my second one had a lot of surprises thrown in that perhaps didn't allow me to express myself in the clearest of ways.
As I was gathering the screenshots for each step I realized that there were two ways to achieve similar results and I think my first mistake was trying to include both ways in one blogpost. The second mistake was modifying what I intended to teach without adjusting the title to match. I left the title like "turning drawings into digital illustrations" when I should've adjusted it to "digitizing drawings" because I no longer intended to guide the student through the whole process of coloring step by step, only the very beginning. This ended up not working so well because the expectations of the results in some cases didn't match the outcome.
Again here I got the best feedback from people that had attempted something similar before. I got great suggestions on making comments for substitutions of some materials as well as including links to tutorials for the coloring process which I left out. I tried in the introduction to explain that you would need to have a base knowledge of painting in order to finish the process but I think I should've been more specific about the WHY again. The reason being that I was not going to be teaching that and in order to have the desired outcome you needed that prior knowledge.
In this particular post I didn't include videos of the process because I thought that it would free the student to use their own style and use their creativity. This turned out not to be a great way to go for the less experienced students since they didn't feel as confident achieving this on their own. I think here I should've gone with the assumption (like in my first experiment) that the person reading had never done anything like this before.
Look at one of the tool/task pairs of other students in the list of class projects:
What strategies did that instructor use that are different from yours?
I went through Rachel's "What is the Paradox of Choice?" through instagram stories and Patrick's "How to Open a Beer Bottle with a Lighter" trough YouTube. I think the first way both of these differed from mine is that they are crazy simple things to learn. They didn't try to include too much which worked perfectly for both platforms. Instagram stories won't allow you to include too much text or videos that are too long either so the format helps you keep things simple and to the point. Even though YouTube does allow for longer format videos I felt that Patrick used the necessary amount to make his point. I appreciated that the whole thing was done as a close up to the bottle because it eliminated possible distractions from the frame. My only question would be "why the black space that stretched for several seconds at the end?" I was kind of expecting something else to happen for a bit.
If you had to pick one of your two task/tool pairs to invest in, how would you improve it?
I would pick my brigadeiro recipe. I would improve it first by splitting each flavor into its own recipe page. Secondly I would perhaps use a platform that I could control all aspects of design better. This way I could place images exactly the way and size I want and make interesting compositions to guide the eye through the instructions in a less overbearing way. I would also take much better pictures of everything and maybe even include a time-lapse video of the whole process.
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