Applerouth knows the importance of good design, especially when it comes to helping young people learn and remember. We’re in for a real treat today because two of Applerouth’s rockstar artists, Zeke McNees and Tina Motway, sat down with me to share their perspective on how art and education intersect with and complement each other.

Zeke is an illustrator, animator, and materials designer who has been with Applerouth for close to ten years. Tina is the lead artist at Applerouth, overseeing all artistic work from book images to videos, as well as collaborating with our marketing department on the materials you see at conferences. They work closely with Applerouth’s Instructional Design (ID) department to create instructional materials that grab a student’s attention and keep them engaged. It makes perfect sense to Zeke and Tina that Applerouth would have sought out artists to create a key part of our pedagogy:

I can personally attest to how Applerouth’s art can stick with you - I still use a who’s/whose illustration of two owls from an older edition of our SAT and ACT book because it does such a great job of explaining the concept while also being utterly charming! You can find a sneak peek of all our wonderful materials here. But the art isn’t just there to entertain students - it’s also helping students to remember concepts without laborious memorization-by-rote:

I appreciate Zeke pointing out that our multimedia approach to education helps make our work more accessible for students. When I was going through training to become an executive function coach, I learned that the brain of a student with ADHD is constantly seeking stimulating experiences; it doesn’t matter whether it’s positive or negative as long as it delivers a spark. So the way you get a student who procrastinates on homework in favor of video games (which light up their brain in all the happy ways) to engage with the material is by using images that create those periodic bursts of stimulus their brain is craving.

This kind of pedagogy is behind all of our work at Applerouth, including the development of Applerouth Online, our new self-prep program. Design played a significant role here as well, both in keeping students interested in the videos themselves as well as making the entire website intuitive to use:

I was delighted to hear that Tina and Zeke loved making the videos as much as my students enjoy learning from them! I often hear from my students how much they’ve gotten out of the videos and genuinely appreciate the way the content is presented, so it shouldn’t have surprised me that students were picking up on the enthusiasm of the design team as well. But Applerouth’s artistic style wasn’t born in a day, and I was amazed to hear about all the behind-the-scenes work that went into creating a unified aesthetic:

‍

While Zeke, Tina, and the rest of the ID team are constantly thinking of ways to improve our pedagogy and student experience, they don’t want to operate in a vacuum! Zeke had a message for anyone who, like us, is passionate about helping students learn for life: