Why Flash?
Vocab Words
Mnemonics
Story Telling
Teaching Things People Will
Remember: Mnemonics
Harry Witchel
Brighton and Sussex Medical School
Why Flash?
Outline
Story Telling
Mnemonics
Vocab Words
• Learning with Flash movies
 Strengths
 Weaknesses
• Learning New Vocabulary Words
 Drip feed new words to avoid overload
• Mnemonics
 Principles for “one-shot” learning
• Story Telling and Narratives
Why Flash?
Vocab Words
Mnemonics
Story Telling
Flash and Teaching
Flash provides memorable and interesting
experiences that go beyond classroom
teaching or text books.
 Novelty
• motivation for paying attention
• Possibly more memorable
 Explaining movements
 Explaining Sounds
 Interactivity
• Much more engaging, eg quizzes
Why Flash?
Vocab Words
Mnemonics
Story Telling
Teaching with Flash
The end-user will NOT memorise your movie
verbatim
 The end-user will often forget your image as
soon as it disappears from the screen.
 Instead, the end-user will make “meaning”
from what you show them.
 The end-user will then remember this
meaning as the “gist” of your message.
• E.g. “it was fun movie about coagulation factor
enzymes, with lots of balls bouncing off one another
and changing colours”
Why Flash?
Vocab Words
Mnemonics
Story Telling
Teaching with Flash
Flash gives the end-user many methods and
motivations for learning information
 If you associate the “flashy bits” of your Flash
movie with pauses or transitions, all the user
will remember is that your movie was “cool”
 They will not remember the information you
were trying to teach them
You need to closely associate the surprising
or funny bits of your movie that they are
going to remember with the information
you are trying to convey
Why Flash?
Vocab Words
Mnemonics
Story Telling
Learning New Vocabulary
New vocabulary words should be presented
one at a time, and they should be defined
immediately and briefly.
A new vocabulary word should be treated
like a Region of Interest (RoI) such that
the end-user’s eye focuses on it.
Complicated charts with many vocabulary
words have to be broken down, simplified,
or re-emphasized one word at a time.
Why Flash?
Story Telling
Mnemonics
Vocab Words
Vocabulary Words as Regions of
Interest
From a student project in 2012 by Cem Dennis-Stubbs
Why Flash?
Story Telling
Mnemonics
Vocab Words
Complex Pathway of Glycolysis:
Only One Step is Taught, Using an RoI
From a student project in 2011 by Louise Ting and Alex Gibbons
Why Flash?
Vocab Words
Mnemonics
Mnemonics
There are (broadly speaking) four ways to get
people to remember a piece of information:
 Repetition
• most reliable
 Associate with strong emotions
• Very unreliable and unpredictable
• Eg “where were you when World Trade Center was
attacked?”
 Create a previous need for that information
• I.e. when a person fails at a task repeatedly, and then
you give them information that will allow them to succeed
Story Telling
 Mnemonics
Why Flash?
Vocab Words
Mnemonics
Story Telling
Mnemonics
Definition: Mental techniques for aiding the
memorization of specific information
 Eg people memorizing the order of a deck of cards.
• In 2002 a British man (Dominic O’Brien) set a world
record by memorizing a random sequence of 2808 playing
cards (54 packs) after looking at each card only once
• Not necessarily the most useful skill unless you are
gambling in Las Vegas
Usually mnemonics is hard work
The principles of mnemonics can be used to make
memorizing some pieces of information much
easier
 E.g. a typical initial treatment to myocardial infarction
is MONA: morphine, oxygen, nitrates and aspirin
Why Flash?
Vocab Words
Mnemonics
Story Telling
Principles of Mnemonics
Grouping information (eg sets of 3)
Associating with the familiar
Places
People and narratives
Taboo, secrets, death, sex
Humour
Vivid sensations
 Not just sight
 Include sounds, feelings, smells, etc
Why Flash?
Information Structuring
Vocab Words
A single word or acronym
Groups of 3 or 4 work best
Story Telling
Mnemonics
Avoid groupings of more than 7
 Hard to get into short term memory
 Unless you have a mnemonic for your mnemonic
• E.g. a rhyme or an acronym
On Old Olympus’s Towering Top
A Finn And German Viewed Some Hops
Mnemonic for Cranial Nerves: Olfactory Optic Oculomotor
Trochlear Trigeminal Abducens Facial Auditory
Glosspharyngeal Vagus SpinalAccessory Hypoglossal
Why Flash?
Vocab Words
Mnemonics
Story Telling
Mnemonics List
Humour
Sex
Death
Violence
Movement
Colours
Sounds
Smells
Feelings
Faces
Places
Tastes
Strong emotions
Family members
Animals
Money
Rhyming
Etc.
Add any of these to an image or memory to make it more vivid and easier to remember.
Why Flash?
Vocab Words
Mnemonics
Story Telling
Further info on Mnemonics
Books by
 Tony Buzan
 Dominic O’Brien
Why Flash?
Vocab Words
Mnemonics in Flash
“All little balls look the same”
Most colour changes are hard to remember
 People cannot remember what it used to be
 Patterns can have more meaning
• Eg solid to barber pole stripey
Story Telling
Mnemonics
Shape changes can be more powerful
 Taking a bite out of a shape (or completing a shape
with a bite out of it) is memorable
• Because what it used to be is related to and meaningful in
context of what it now is
Changes in scale are very
powerful
 Use them to teach the most important info
Why Flash?
Vocab Words
Mnemonics
Story Telling
Characters and anthropomorphising
We remember people and stories
You can give molecules human-like
characteristics
 Especially “wanting”, but also strong (or
humorous) emotions
Narrative structures are memorable
There are three elements to a story:
 A want or need
 A process to satisfy the want
 The result of the process
Why Flash?
Story Telling
Mnemonics
Vocab Words
Anthropomorphising an Enzyme
The enzyme PFK-1 is a happy character about to phosphorylate Fructose-6-Phosphate (cheerleader)
From a student project in 2011 by Louise Ting and Alex Gibbons
Why Flash?
Vocab Words
All patient cases ARE narratives
The patient needs to get better.
You (the doctor) want to find a diagnosis or
a treatment.
Story Telling
Mnemonics
Narrative structures
 A want or need
• to heal the disease
 A process to satisfy the want
• To successfully diagnose, OR to administer
treatment
 The result of the process
• Recovery OR death (either one makes a good story)
Why Flash?
Vocab Words
Mnemonics
Story Telling
Places are memorable
Especially the details
Could be a city
Could be their kitchen
It helps if the place is vividly recalled
A place the person knows well
A place the person imagines vividly