Because you will create storyboards in Science Forward, I wanted to use this post to elaborate on one of the benefits of storyboarding mentioned in the article linked above, “Storyboarding Research.” Though written for people who are pursuing a doctoral degree, the piece contains lots of helpful information about storyboarding: what it is, why it helps, and plenty of links to examples. I strongly recommend reading the entire post because your application of storyboarding for your assignment in Science Forward will stronger if you understand storyboarding as a concept.
As explained in the article at Medium, storyboarding increases your project’s chance at success because you have to come up with a long-term plan:
It helps envision, or picture in miniature, and long in advance, a finished product, allowing all those in a project involved to begin mentally run, rerun and debug each scene or angle.
And:
Storyboarding is about envisioning research. It asks: ‘If everything went as well as it could (given initial expectations), what would I find out or end up arguing?’ Or: ‘What if things went “badly”- in the sense of diverging a lot from initial expectations? or showing that I do not really understand what was going on? or that things are just more complex than I thought? What then would the argument be?’ ‘Are there any intermediate outputs, findings or results that I can bank for sure? Or anything that can offer me some “insurance” benefit, something to “lay off” against the largest risks of things going awry?’
What the author describes here is not just needless “what if” worrying! Rather, as described in the article, “storyboarding” is really an umbrella term encompassing a series of processes required to execute a plan over a long(er) period of time including applying prior knowledge/experience to an unknown, conceptualizing the steps necessary to research your topic, and then organizing those steps into a logical sequence.
How might storyboarding help you with your research project in Science Forward as well as the other areas of your life? In a nutshell, storyboarding forces you to think both creatively and strategically before acting. Once you get used to the process then storyboarding becomes another tool or process to use as part of your strategy to develop, plan, and execute long-term projects. While most people can relate to setting a goal or envisioning the end product of their work but they have trouble with the steps taken in between setting and achieving a goal. Sometimes they have difficulty creating a logical sequence of steps or have an unrealistic time schedule; other times they get discouraged when they run into difficulties and can only conceive of one course of action. Storyboarding is a great way to define your end product and your desired results and then be able to create a plan that will increase your chance at achieving those results. For example, one project might be writing a paper or creating a presentation with the goal of getting an A; other projects with desired results might include grad school applications with the desired result of getting into grad school, financial planning with the goal of saving for retirement, or researching the effects of plastics on marine environments in hopes of mitigating the effects of pollution. Storyboarding may not be helpful depending on your personal working style, of course, but hopefully this post has clarified some reasons as to how and why you may benefit from it.
