Oliver asked, > Can someone point me to research done to determine how many and what types > of colors and shapes students can successfully remember or distinguish or > use immediately when using tools for education?
Oliver, my answer addresses the part of your question asking about color. Forgive me if this is too academic for what you're looking for; I don't know what background you have in color science and how specific an answer you are expecting. There has been quite a bit of sound research done in creating distinct color sets for various applications, particularly military and aviation. The science behind this starts with a perceptual color space - one whose scale calibrates to perceived differences in color rather than physically measured differences. Based on the number of distinct colors desired, there are recommended sets of maximally distinguishable colors. In applying an approach like this, you would distinguish between the light source - reflective colors vs. emissive light - as these are modeled with different color spaces (CIELAB for reflective; CIELUV for emissive light). I assume that your education application runs on a computer monitor, which would be the latter. But it should not at all matter, in theory, whether the application is for education vs. say, gaming, currency trading, etc. Unfortunately it has been too many years since my hands have touched this color science literature, so I can't quickly point to a source that offers suggestions for, say, a set of 5 reflective colors that are maximally distinct. But these do exist, and I suspect with a bit of digging on the web, you should be able to unearth what you need. For a quick and dirty solution, have a look at http://dba.med.sc.edu/price/irf/Adobe_tg/models/cieluv.html and pick some colors that are roughly equally spaced around this diagram. Paul Eisen Principal User Experience Architect tandemseven http://www.tandemseven.com ________________________________________________________________ *Come to IxDA Interaction08 | Savannah* February 8-10, 2008 in Savannah, GA, USA Register today: http://interaction08.ixda.org/ ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
