Classroom Adaptation of Memory Palace: Meme Journey

Memory palace meets memes.

It began when I asked my students to deliver a short presentation—3-5 minutes—on an author of their choosing.

“No notes,” I said, thinking I would outwit them into learning not only about their author, but also a study technique that would benefit them for the rest of their lives (cue evil laugh).

As I explained the memory palace method, some of them noticed I was a bit too eager. They were skeptical. What resulted, was a tension point in the means in which this assignment was going to get done.

“Do I have to do it this way?”

“Hmm. Golly,” I said with a tight smile. “I suppose you don’t HAVE to do it this way. But I think this would be a great way to do it.”

So, what did some of them do?

They made some of the most extraordinarily GIFed the F@#$ out animated canva decks that I have ever seen, with the animations acting as mnemonics that came onto the screen, prompting them for the next piece of information in their presentation. Brilliant!

Thus the meme journey was born, combining the memory palace or journey method with canva style animations.

The way a meme journey works is that you take pictures of your stations or fixed locations along your memory palace journey. Then you upload them to canva and turn them into striking, memorable, hilarious, or deadpan mnemonics interacting with the picture of the location. Finally, you can print out your memes and quiz yourself like flashcards. Printing out the memes and having them paper copy seems to be a much better way to quiz than on canva—the brain works differently when looking at a screen.

The meme journey has proven to be a popular option, and many of my students can navigate canva the way a data scientist navigates an excel doc. Many of them love the word “meme” and think that “memes” are so swell.

Here are some benefits to the method that I can see so far:

• Students lose things all the time. Canva auto saves their work on the platform in the cloud. This is a huge benefit that mitigates the problem that I’ve had with beading (losing their beads!).

• Canva animations could provide scalability. You could seemingly add many different symbols, gifs, and animations to slides over a semester or a school year.

• Some ideas that I may try next year: you could have students create categories at the start of the year and have each station represent a category. Students could determine an organizing schema for your subject at the start or the end of the year. For example: authors, literary devices, historical information, grammar, vocabulary, writing skills etc. Then, they fill in animations based on all the things they would add to each category that they’ve learned over the course of the year. At the end of the year, they can do digital presentations for an audience OR a tour of their locations and explain all the things they learned in each category. So, they could be creating their meme journey, modifying it, and finalizing it as the year progresses with their slides…all based around a journey through physical locations of the school building.

• It might also be effective as a vocabulary tool. You could have students categorize vocabulary (by roots, by subjects, by topics) and have each category be a station in the memory palace and a slide. Then the animations are all the words that fit or work with that category.

But, there is something about the effectiveness of this method that I’m still troubleshooting. I’ve had some students retain less with this method. It’s hard to tell if it’s mainly from lack of practice outside of class.

Here are two failure modes I’ve identified to look out for:

1. It is possible for a student to get sucked into creating the meme at the expense of recall practice with the memes. This is a time concern. We are always working with the friction of time at school, and if a student spends most of the class time on memeing/ canva navigating, they are not spending that time imagining and recalling. So, this is a balance to look out for with some students.

2. There is research about how writing by hand or drawing by hand activates the brain differently. This method might mitigate those benefits.

3. It is possible to be disconnected from the location and living in the interstitial space of canva. The method probably works best by activating both the physical dimension as well as the digital dimension. Go to the locations when you practice with you print outs. Imagine yourself in the location with the meme happening in front of you.

Here are some tips for this method:

• Have the students choose the locations and develop a logic for why they are placing a particular term, concept, or idea in a given location beforehand.

• Have the students sequence the concepts, ideas, or information in a way that has a logic beforehand.

• Lead a visualization practice time at the start of class where students practice recalling from the locations without their memes. They can alternate between using the memes and then recalling just using the location.

• You might highlight some of the most effective memes for others on quizzes, tests, or other classroom materials.

• Meming is social. Having them work together to create memes, share memes with each other, and/ or see which memes naturally go viral in their effectiveness are further ways to explore this.

The principle that supports this method: retrieval practice and all mnemonics are going to way more effective when grounded in familiar physical locations on a fixed journey (aka a memory palace).