I found myself in a 2 hour meeting with no pen or pencil, wishing desperately to be able to doodle, SO THAT I COULD STAY FOCUSED.

I doodled while watching her talk, and now I kind of want someone to analyze my doodles.

(My doodle, uploaded by taking a picture with my iPhone using the Genius Scan app, which can make images into pdfs.)

I found myself thinking that my doodles were kind of limited, and that sometimes I can’t think of what to draw and end up just coloring in boxes. This makes me despair about my lack of divergent thinking, like Sir Ken Robinson talks about in his video.

Vi Hart is a mathemusician who has videos of math doodles about number theory. (My favorite is the binary trees.) Also check out the binary hand dance, infinite elephants, and what’s up with noises.

Doodling also ties in with the importance of visual literacy in the world today. Students are exposed to visuals every day (think billboards, tv commercials, magazines) and need to be TAUGHT to be critical thinkers of what they are seeing. Cheryl Lemke writes a great article, “Innovation Through Technology” on this in 21st Century Skills: Rethinking How Students Learn. They learn this by both thinking about visuals and creating them. Some people (myself included) express themselves better visually, and therefore learn better this way.

To sum up:

More doodling + more art = more learning.