Teaching information aesthetics as a research class in China

Teaching how to conduct productive research in a classroom setting is a challenge. This article reports on an attempt to scale up the research training in a class of 41 undergraduate and graduate students. The research topic, information aesthetics, covers information visualization and generative art. Seven teams were set up to conduct seven different projects within the topic, and several were able to produce quality research papers published or accepted by journals and conferences. The authors report on their approaches to teaching information aesthetics as a research topic, team set up, and team assessment as well as on the final results in terms of research output. The most important learning experiences in teaching this class were determining how to enable effective team work and maximize the students' research potential.