I am currently in the process of starting to formalize my mathematics notes, both hand-written and digital. In that I have reached somewhat of a conundrum. I have learned both through practice and formal education that colorization can help the students visualize and learn the material better.
My question is about if and if so how colorization should be used.
The website Better explained has a longer article discussing the benefits of colorization. Here is one example
In my opinion this explanation is somewhat cluttered, there are too many colors in addition the purple and magenta are to similar. I have a couple of suggestions to improve this
- Highlight one color at a time (this could easily be done in a beamer presentation), however I am afraid this would consume too much time.
- Have one color for variables, one for constants the rest remains black.
- Everything black.
Are any of the suggestions above good, or are there better solutions I have not considered? Any feedback is appreciated.
This is rather a soft question - it's primarily opinion-based and not entirely on topic.
Personally, colours don't help my learning, understanding or retention of a specific concept. The psychedelica of the equation is rather confusing, and when you start trying to work with even more complex equations, the result is far too complicated. What's more, with all these wild colours trying to grab our attention to the important details, the question is: which bits are actually the really key ones? If you picked the key detail, the bit people will forget and highlight that, sure, or highlight an equation in one colour, that is a perfectly valid strategy I have seen many fellow students use, but the way you are doing it is, in my opinion, ineffectual and counterproductive.