Introducing the
‍ImpVis community_

The ImpVis project team consists of staff and students from Imperial College London. We create interactive online visualisations on abstract concepts spanning a wide range of topics. Each visualisation is developed for implementation within a particular STEM module - staff and students work in partnership to achieve the most effective educational design.

A word from our ImpVis project lead, Dr Caroline Clewley

Interactive visualisations are excellent learning tools to help students gain an intuitive understanding of abstract concepts. However, as an instructor it can be hard to find visualisations that fit your module just right, aligning with your own intended learning outcomes. The ImpVis visualisations are all designed based on specific learning goals and co-created by staff and students. This gives our team insight into how students learn the material, resulting in visualisations that are a good fit for both the module content and their audience. Working in partnership benefits our team members too: staff have a better understanding of their learners and students integrate better in the academic community, whilst picking up a wide range of professional skills. Best of all is the outcome: seeing learners put your joint product to good use!

Dr Caroline Clewley, ImpVis project lead

Working in partnership:
our three guiding principles_ ?

1

Mutual Respect

The partnership draws its strength from equally valuing staff and students’ expertise. Members of staff are experts in teaching and their subject-specific domain; students have the expertise of being learners and understanding the student audience. Each respects the insight of their partner.

2

Joint Ownership

A partnership means joint ownership of both the development process and the final product. Both staff and students contribute to the decision-making of how to work on the visualisation, and both make decisions on visualisation look and functionality.

3

Shared Responsibility

The responsibility for the visualisation and its development is shared, but not equal. It is jointly up to the staff and students involved in the partnership to define who is responsible for what. Usually, the student is responsible for the coding process, and the staff member is responsible for ensuring the visualisation is factually correct.

Join our community_ ?

We welcome new staff and student partners.

Any visualisation starts out by forming staff-student partnerships. Click the button below to read about how you can join ImpVis.

Join us>

Our project origins

ImpVis was founded in 2017 at Imperial College London, under the name of Imperial Visualisations. It was awarded the Excellence Grant for Learning and Teaching Innovation, which funded its development for three consecutive years.

The founding team of Imperial Visualisations consisted of Dr Caroline Clewley, Dr Jonathan Eastwood, Prof Peter Török, and Prof Dimitri Vvedensky from the Department of Physics. After a successful funding proposal, the team was joined by 15 summer students. This summer team set the course for the future: they decided on the core platform and technologies and created the first set of 23 interactive visualisations for use within Physics undergraduate modules. In 2018, the team expanded across four academic departments, laying the basis for the wide range of STEM visualisations featuring on our website today. Each of our creators is credited as an author on their visualisations: a quick glance through our ‘Teach’ environment will reveal the huge number of students engaged on our project throughout the years.