Young Minds
27 Jul 2015
Trying For Fun, And Ending Up With A Textbook Instead
Note: This blog post was originally published as a blog on Scientific American – http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/frontiers-for-young-minds/trying-for-fun-and-ending-up-with-a-textbook-instead/ Knowing your audience is a vital piece of science communication: what is important to them, what is exciting to them, and what will send the right message. But it is easy to fall into the trap of thinking that knowing about your audience is the same as knowing what they actually like. I speak from personal experience and – as the manager of a journal founded on the idea of asking kids to review scientific articles for their own peers – the irony of my own surprise at kid feedback is not lost. We recently set about creating a new design for the PDF versions of our articles. The goal was to make them more accessible and more enticing to young readers. Our team came up with a series of proposals that were each designed with the following goals in mind: Make the articles easier to read Take better advantage of the figures Make the articles seem more fun Make the new vocabulary easier to understand Make the articles feel as little like school as possible Get young readers to want to read all the way to the end […]
