"I can't even draw a straight line!"

"I don't even know where to start"

"I'll never be able to draw like that!"

Drawing is a skill that can be difficult to learn for many people. The act of drawing is complex and relies on many different physical and cognitive functions working together including fine motor control, spatial reasoning, hand-eye coordination, visual memory, perception, and so on. Mastery of the skill requires a great deal of effort and many hours of practice. Many people have low self-efficacy with regards to sketching, and this hinders their ability to improve and master the skill.

One of the biggest problems with traditional pedagogy - Studio environments is the comparison to peers and lack of feeling any sense of achievement for many people. It often leads to feelings of learned helplessness. It's also difficult for teachers to cater their teaching to individual students. They simply don't have the time our resources to always individualize the learning experience.

My research has led to me realize the major difference between beginners who struggle at sketching and their more advanced peers is self-efficacy. I believe there is an important theoretical “threshold” which shifts a beginners mindset and leads to further mastery of sketching. Some people reach this threshold quickly and easily, others struggle. Either way, at this point the learner is:
- Beginning to unlearn any negative thought patterns that kept them from improving drawing skills i.e. “I’m not a good at drawing” or “I’m just not creative / artistic” Beginning to be encouraged by seeing peer’s work, rather than discouraged. (Peers should still be around the same level of mastery)
- Are more likely to take control of their learning experience (self-regulated learning)
- May gain a more intrinsic desire to improve sketching ability without relying on external praise or external motivators.

Since learning sketching is very much about practice, it was important early on to interview individuals with various skill levels (from novice to expert) to understand how motivations to practice sketching shift over time. As it turns out, the motivations largely follow Self Determination Theory - Individuals tend to be more extrinsically motivated at first (seeking praise, positive feedback, or other external rewards), then as their skill improves they need to be more intrinsically motivated to master the skill so that they can utilize it for collaboration, creativity, etc.

This allowed for the creation of 3 personas based on skill level.

The first prototypes were low-fidelity and paper-based. This allowed me to rapidly explore exercise designs with virtually the same interaction, just real pen and paper, not a stylus and a touchscreen device. For the assessment, I used a Wizard of Oz technique to simulate what the software's feedback might be like.

I went on to build interactive prototypes with HTML / CSS / JS. Not long after this our NSF grant was accepted and SRL began working on the project (I joined SRL 2 years later to lead development)

I went on to build interactive prototypes with HTML / CSS / JS. Not long after this our NSF grant was accepted and SRL began working on the project to add sketch recognition algorithms (I joined SRL 2 years later to lead development). This version was deployed at Georgia Tech and we were able to prove that the using the tool over a semester can lead to statistically significant improvements in:

Accuracy of basic primitives

Line quality of basic primitives

Speed of basic primitives

After joining SRL I designed a far better summative feedback system, a user profile for visualizing performance over time (to empower both students and instructors), and a novel sketch-based game for line work called ZenSketch. The game won a global game design competition with 30 entries at CHI Play 2017 and has been shown to motivate practice of line work.

The software has ongoing deployment in 3 universities and has also been deployed in 3 high schools.