Due to the prior mentioned limitations in data collection, I do not have an incredibly large sample size – as visible in the results of my survey.
With the data collected from the 7 questions I have actually found the best way to visualise it is microsoft form’s own pie charts. I tried making bar charts on excel using the exported data, but for ease of understanding and presentation I am attaching below screenshots of the data from Microsoft Forms.
What we see in question one above is a mixed bag of prior knowledge to 3d printing terminolgy, which is good as it doesn’t swing the survey into bias for people who either already know everything or have never heard any of the terms.
Question two is slightly expected, in an art school we would expect most people to respond well to visual learning. I included it though to be able to track the answers of anyone who had answered otherwise. The results will make us think about having more visual resources in the future though, as opposed to text based results.
It is interesting that 6 out of 7 respondents said they learnt something from the poster in question 3, especially given that there was a mixture including respondents who already knew about 3d printing, showing that this type of resource can be useful to all levels of learning. The ‘no opinion’ answer could be someone who rushed the survey without looking at the poster, or someone who wanted to answer ‘no’ but was too shy.
I am obviously happy with the answer to question 4, that all respondents thought the resource was useful. I had included the question so that respondents would have the option to say that it was just repeating things that they’d already seen, was too overwhelming, or was too much. However it must also be noted that there could be a bias in those answering wanting to please the workshop and knowing that this would be the preferred answer.
Question 5 was an optional open text box to fill in an opinion about the poster, which got 5 proper responses – mostly positive but one pointing out that there was a lot of text. It was a balance between knowing that in person / in workshop usage would be mostly pointing at the images, but for independant learning explanations would be needed.
The responses to question 6 were interesting – with the majority of respondents indicating that they prefer talking to a technician / tutor in person. While this resource had been catered to being useful for both in person guiding through with us technicians and independant study online, the need is clearly there for wanting more in person guidance and support. This is probably the most eye opening from the research – as it indicates that instead of focusing purely on resources and content there is a remit for perhaps offering more one-on-one tutorials (both in person and online, for access reasons) instead of developing the project and creating further resources tailored to independent learning.
The final question was again just so I could situate/contextualise the answers, and most of the respondents were students who were my target demographic.