Data lists made visual

Data lists, nodes, heads, and tails. These were all foreign objects to me at the time and to be honest my grasp of them today is still a bit wooly.

The wikipedia version: A singly linked data list is a type of linked list that is unidirectional, that is, it can be traversed in only one direction from head to the last node (tail). Each element in a linked list is called a node.

This is part two in the series of old work I am posting here. You can see part one here. In effect, this is one of the first pieces of work I did after graduating from the Institute of Technology Blanchardstown. This is now part of TUDublin. So, it is fitting that one of the first paid gigs came from them.

Motion graphics.

Employed as a study aid to teach the concept of creating data lists, essentially the objective was to support students in grasping a complex unfamiliar concept. Typically this required the lecturer to conduct a white boarding session for each student before they grasped the concept.

In total ten videos made the series, which myself and Daire put together over the course of five weeks using a combination of Apple Motion, and Flash. The result, it would be fair to say, skews young. We had in our mind that they could be used to teach kids. The college runs boot camp in the summer to teach children to code.

The lecturer Arnold provides the voiceover, and had to teach us the fundamentals first. So, we got the white boarding lesson, and it did indeed take a few times to catch on. Overall, the end result isn’t bad for the five weeks given to learning, scripting, motion graphics and editing.

The videos serve as an introduction to people getting their heads around this topic. The metaphor of a train is one that Arnold uses to teach students the data lists concept, so we ran with that.