With Andy Lovatt
School of Engineering
Faculty of Science, Agriculture and Engineering
What did you do?
One of the high points for our Stage 3 students is the annual poster competition normally held in a large venue with all students and supervisors simultaneously. This is something I could not do this year due to the pandemic restrictions. I used Miro to set up a poster exhibition for around 80 posters which is simply accessible via a URL.
Miro allows all posters to be viewed simultaneously and facilitates easy navigation across a large workspace with rapid zooming capabilities to focus on specific details.
Sticky notes were set up so viewers could leave comments and queries.
Image of sample Miro boards
Who is involved?
Mr Andy Lovatt, Lecturer, Electrical and Electronic Engineering
Dr Raghda Zahran, Learning and Teaching Development Service (LTDS)
How did you do it?
The students’ posters had previously been uploaded to Canvas as part of their assessed workload.
We manually imported the poster files and categorised them into the three groups within EEE. This required some resizing and the addition of captions to identify each supervisor’s posters.
A central panel was added to explain the workspace, and editable sticky notes were positioned to allow viewers to add comments to the posters.
Select this video for an overview of the Miro board from Andy.
Why did you do it?
Viewing an A0 poster on a regular size screen is a challenge. On a conventional PC the PDF viewer allows zooming and navigation but requires much tedious use of vertical and horizontal scrolling.
The pinch and zoom facility of a mobile device is easier, but the screen size is also a barrier to easy use on those devices. Miro offers a mouse-based experience which feels more intuitive, allowing the viewer to hover and move across the landscape of the workspace in a manner which would be familiar to users of Google Maps.
The loss of the poster competition is a blow to student engagement as it was always a focal point of the academic year in which students could mix, view each other’s work, and have direct contact with academics from other specialisms who show interest in their projects.
From a staff viewpoint is motivational to see the work being supervised by colleagues and provides a method to showcase the calibre of students as they are completing the BEng course.
Does it work?
As you hear in Andy’s video, this process did work and it will be something that will used again for this competition and other future activities including NSS discussions.
Graduate Framework
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- Engaged
- Resilient
- Creative, innovative, and enterprising
- Future-focused
- Confident