Hitachi came out with a short video animation called “The Dawn of the Tera Era” to explain the concept of a terabyte to a young audience. In an earlier post, I briefly described what 12 terabytes look like.
As Hitachi GST embarks upon its latest educational campaign and debuts a new market vision which it encapsulates as “The Dawn of the Tera Era,” the company knew the time was once again right to produce a new video animation, given how successful these have always been in the past. This amazing collision of Capacity, Content and Culture has resulted in explosive growth of the amounts and types of information people are now storing. Megabytes are long forgotten. Today, gigabytes are being replaced by terabytes, hence the Tera Era. It’s happening now. This is the Tera Era.
When I was preparing for my presentation at NI-TC about learning styles and technical writing, I was searching for different examples of the use of visuals in learning. I found this video and thought it was very clever of Hitachi to come up with this fun video explaining a “simple” concept. You’d think it’d be easy to explain that a terabyte as being 1000 gigabytes. Then again, you’d have to explain that a gigabyte is 1000 megabytes, and a megabyte is 1000 kilobytes, and so on. To a kid, explaining terabytes using more jargon gets him/her nowhere. It’s like trying to explain to a child how much debt the U.S. is in! All s/he cares about is what you can do with a terabyte!
This video shows kids all the “stuff” you can store in a terabyte using languages and images they understand.
Interesting.
I was going to show this video in my presentation, but due to limited time (and too many other examples I had), I didn’t get to shoe the video. One question I was going to ask the audience was how technical writers can come up with creative ways to explain a concept. Obviously, who your audience is determines the kind of creative content you produce. You wouldn’t want to be showing silly videos like this one to a mature audience. Then again, Google did something out of the ordinary and came out with a comic to explain their latest browser, Chrome.
Explaining Virtual Instrumentation and Graphical Programming
Here at National Instruments, we’re in the business of introducing virtual instrumentation and graphical programming to the world. While many of our users are hard core engineers, developers, and programmers, NI also has strategies to target a much younger audience, from university to high school, all the way down to elementary school students!
The idea is to introduce people to graphical programming as early as possible so that in another decade (or two), the world would be saturated with advanced LabVIEW programmers!
So how do you explain something like “virtual instrumentation” and “graphical programming” to a six-year old?
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