IEEE VIS Workshop on Visualization Education, Literacy, and Activities 2025

This is the 3^rd workshop on visualization education, literacy, and activities. This half-day workshop happens with the IEEE VIS 2025 conference in Vienna (Austria). The workshop aims to become the primary forum to share and discuss advances, challenges, and methods at the intersection of visualization and education. It addresses an interdisciplinary audience from and beyond visualization, education, learning analytics, science communication, arts and design, psychology, or people from adjacent fields such as data science and HCI.

In its 3rd edition, we introduce annual spotlight topics, with this year’s topic being Modalities of learning and engaging. This also includes topics of education for visualization (ed4vis) as well as visualization for education (vis4ed). It will include presentations of research papers published in the IEEE Xplore library, educator reports published in the Nightingale Magazine, and discussion and vis activities in working groups.

The full workshop proposal is available here.

Program

The workshop is scheduled for Monday, November 3 (9:00 - 12:30 GMT+1).

Presentations last 5 mins followed by 2 mins of Q&A.

9:00 - 9:15: Workshop Opening & Outline (Christina Stoiber)

9:15 - 9:30: Paper Session 1: Media, Tangibles & Representation (Chair: Mathis Brossier)

• Teaching Air Quality and Data Visualization Using Tangible Models for Middle Schoolers - Yixuan Li, Alex Endert, Jessica Roberts
• Representational Affordances: Teaching Data Visualization across Print, Digital, and Physical Media - Yvette Shen

09:30 - 09:45: Paper Session 2: Pedagogy, Critical Thinking & Classroom Practice (Chair: Lonni Besancon)

• From Data to Insight: Using Contextual Scenarios to Teach Critical Thinking in Data Visualisation - Jonathan C Roberts, Dr Peter W. S. Butcher, Panagiotis D. Ritsos
• Examining a PCP Intervention through the Anderson and Krathwohl Taxonomy Lens - Chandana Srinivas, Bhavi Kenia, Kelsey Urgo, Elif E. Firat, Robert S. Laramee, Alark Joshi

09:45 - 10:00: Paper Session 3: Frameworks & Methodologies for Visualization Education (Chair: Jonathan Roberts)

• Bridging Educational Theories of Cognitive Load to Visualization Design and Evaluation - Anne-Flore Cabouat, Lorenzo Ciccione, Samuel Huron, Tobias Isenberg, Petra Isenberg
• An Emergent Design Study Methodology for Education: Reflections on the Robin System for Visualizing U.S. Migration Data - Alexander Bendeck, Clio Andri, John Stasko

10:00 - 10:30: Educator reports (Chair: Magdalena Boucher)

2 mins elevator pitch for each educator report followed by a grouped panel discussion.

• Learning to Read Academic Papers by Making Data Comics - Alyxander Burns
• Seeing Speed: A Classroom Challenge in Color Mapping and Meaning - Evan Peck
• Exploring Data Detective Practices as a Class Activity - Ruishan Wu, Zezhong Wang, Haidan Liu, Krithika Balasubramanyam, Kanak Gautam, Aham Gupta, Shannon McAllister, Sheelagh Carpendale
• Teaching Critical Visualization: a field report - Andrew M McNutt, Shiyi He, Sujit Kumar, Purbid Bambroo, Nastaran Jadidi, John Bovard, Chang Han
• Building an Explorable Explainer for Parallel Coordinates - Keith Andrews, Romana Gruber
• Panel discussion (10 mins)

10:30 - 11:00 Coffee break.

11:00 - 12:30: Working Group Activities and Discussions (Session Chair: TBA)

• Seeing Speed: A Classroom Challenge in Color Mapping and Meaning.

Workshop goals and scope of topics

With this workshop, we want to achieve the following goals:

• Build a forum and interdisciplinary community around teaching data visualization, open to researchers, students, and practitioners outside the traditional VIS community
• Share research on visualization literacy, education and teaching, and practices
• Collect, test, and systematize learning activities
• Discuss best practices and challenges concerning visualization education and literacy
• Experience hands-on sessions with visualization games and playful learning activities
• Attend discussion groups for in-depth conversations on various topics

The workshop topics include, but are not limited to:

• Modalities (e.g., videos, comics, serious games)
• Visualization Activities & Games
• Engagement with visualizations
• Generative AI and visualization (in learning and assessment)
• Visualization literacy and pedagogy in visualization
• Learning goals and learning methods
• Evaluation methods and learning analytics
• Educational tools
• Hybrid and online teaching
• Reflective and research practices
• Understanding audiences
• Guidelines, strategies, and guidance for education
• Debate and discussions on visualization guidelines and well-established knowledge
• Challenges and personal experiences
• Experiential learning (hands-on learning and physicalization)
• Visualizations for public education (e.g., health education, science communication)
• Teaching to encourage creativity and design critique
• Accessibility of visualization learning resources

Submission Guidelines and Reviewing Process

The workshop will accept two types of submissions, peer-reviewed by at least two PC members and one workshop organizer.

Paper submissions: full papers (4–8 pages excluding references, must follow the formatting guidelines for VGTC Conference Style Template); submissions will be published at the IEEE Xplore with authors’ permission. Note: Similar to the VIS paper stream, we accept both double-blind (anonymized) and single-blind (not anonymized) submissions.

Educator reports: short reports (1–2 pages, template agnostic) to discuss opinions or reflections on teaching experiences or describe the results of a datavis activity conducted and how it could be reused by others and in other contexts; they will be published in the Nightingale magazine (pre-arranged with the Data Visualization Society). This is not intended to be assessed as scientific writing; we recommend framing these reports similar to blog posts. The goal of these reports is to disseminate knowledge to non-academic audiences.

At least one author for each paper or educator report must register and attend the conference in person.

Important Dates

All deadlines are at 11:59pm (23:59) AoE (Anywhere on Earth)

• July 1, 2025 extended to July 10, 2025: Paper and Educator Report Submission
• August 1, 2025: Author Notification
• August 15, 2025: Camera-ready Submission

Submissions will be accepted through PCS.

Organizers

• Christina Stoiber, St. Pölten University of Applied Sciences
• Fateme Rajabiyazdi, Carleton University
• Mandy Keck, University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria
• Magdalena Boucher, St. Pölten University of Applied Sciences
• Jonathan C. Roberts, Bangor University
• Lonni Besançon, Linköping University
• Mathis Brossier, Linköping University
• Benjamin Bach, Inria Bordeaux