Challenge & Selection:

During business school I evidenced first hand how learning financial mathematics from scratch is very difficult for some people. The teacher tried to teach us how we needed to look at finances in a different way. All of the math we had learned this far in our lives deferred from the logic of the financial mathematics we were learning. Luckily, I use the visualization tool a lot in my day to day, which helps me understand difficult things just by picuting or drawing them. This enabled me to understand this new logic more easily and to excel in this class. But I was one of the few who weren’t struggling with this subject. Many of my friends came to me for help, and I decided I needed to use the same design tool that helped me understand the complex logic behind the financial mathematics, the visualization tool. This tool would simplify the idea and make them understand it in a deeper, more complete way.

You see, when the teacher was talking, every person in the room understood something different because words are ambiguous. Two people can understand two different things from the same words. But the visualization tool takes all of this ambiguity away by presenting a clear picture of what the idea is in a visual, easy to understand manner.

Application:

To apply this tool into the teaching of financial mathematics I had to get creative. I decided that I would teach them while doing an exercise from our course book. I started by creating a timeline with different marks, each one representing each time period the problem had. Then, we read out loud the problem. We started putting in the relevant information on the white board we were using. This information could be the APR, the payments, the growth or any other relevant data that was given in the problem. While we were writing down the information, there was an open discussion on what the words on the book meant, which led to the collaboration of all the participants of the project.

When we had all the relevant information written down, we started drawing it into the timeline. We used rectangles to show each payment and its size and made each one in a different size to show how the growth affected each one of them. When we finished, we had drawn every payment with its proper size, so we could see clearly how they changed in time. This way, every person understood the same thing when seeing the timeline. This made it easier then for some of them to understand when and how this money moved through time, which is one of the most difficult things to master in this subject.

Insight & Approach:

After the application of the tool, my peers said to have the idea more clear in their heads now. This proved to me that the reason they were struggling was because they failed to understand the idea of the subject through the teacher’s words. The ambiguity of the words combined with the difficulty of the course were making my peers struggle in comprehending an idea that they now master. With the tool, we all learned how much easier it is to understand difficult subjects when we find a way to visualize them in a creative manner. This way, I knew that the application of this design tool was a success.

Since I discovered how powerful the visualization tool is for making difficult ideas unambiguous and easy to understand, the next time I need to solve a problem like this one I will use the same tool. Furthermore, next time I will try to get as much feedback as possible, which will give me more information over the problem and solution process.

