Alternative assessment idea: the infographic

Help students tap into their creative side for giving alternative assessments in online classes.

Andrew Morrison
2 min readAug 27, 2020
Infographic explaining how to apply Hooke’s Law

This semester in an effort to make my general education physics class have assessments that are slightly-less googleable, I have decided to ask all my students to convert the problems that I am asking them on the assessments into graphical formats such as a comic strip or infographic.

The above figure is my attempt to show an example of what they might do for answering the following question:

A fairly stiff spring has a 2 kg mass hanging from it, and is displaced from its unstretched length. Another 2 kg is added to it and it stretches an additional 25 cm.

What is the spring constant, k? (Give units!)

I started making the infographic using Canva.com. I have signed up for the free account and have used it in the past to make a sign or two to hang in classrooms or on my office door.

The trickiest part of making the infographic was drawing the springs. But like almost everything you want to do in life today, there is a YouTube tutorial for how to draw springs:

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Andrew Morrison
Andrew Morrison

Written by Andrew Morrison

Physics professor with research interest in musical acoustics

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