Using online comic strip generators to enhance the student experience in bioscie
Using online comic strip generators to enhance the student experience in bioscience education
Dr Shelini Surendran and Geyan Sasha Surendran
What is the idea?
The use of sequential illustrations to tell stories has been present since prehistoric humans painted series of pictures on caves to effectively transmit culture and values to their children (Hadzigeorgiou & Stefanich, 2000). In education, storytelling is a useful approach for learning, allowing kinaesthetic learners to remember the emotional connections associated with the story, reinforcing context-based learning (Hadzigeorgiou & Stefanich, 2000). Comic strips are examples of multimodal texts that combine both text and imagery for storytelling (Wijaya et al., 2021). Comics have the ability to concisely convey immediate visceral meanings that textbooks cannot.
Students were encouraged to use speech bubbles and technical words related to the stages of cellular respiration within their storyline. Finally, students were told to write their comic strips in a creative way, for example the students could portray mitochondrion as a superhero such as ‘Energy-cat’ or any other fun character. The role of the teacher was to facilitate the creation of the stages of respiration. At the end of the activity, students were formatively assessed using a marking criteria (Table 1).
Why this idea?
Comic strips have been used in the humanities and have been largely ignored in science education. For a long time, comic strips had been deemed as only suitable for children, as they do not contain lengthy prose. However, comic strips have the power to convey important scientific messages in a more interesting and comprehensible way for adults, compared to using a textbook or newspaper articles (Koutnikova, 2017). Comic strips are memorable learning aids, as they are usually organised in panels containing a single message (González-Espada, 2003; McCloud 1993).
Comic strip reading is an active process as the reader needs to fill the gaps between the juxtaposed panels, which contain a complex interplay of words and images (Rota & Izquierdo, 2003). Moreover, comic strips encompass elements of humour and fun, which may make it a useful pedagogic tool to engage students and motivate them to read scientific content in a fun way (Garner, 2006). We observed from this activity that using educational comics makes learning fun and memorable. Comic strips are able to integrate cognitive processes associated with the psychomotor domain, due to the incorporation of auditory, kinaesthetic and visual learning methods (Wright & Sherman, 1999). Similar findings have been established that scientific comics enhance student interest and satisfaction in comparison to text-only books (Lin et al., 2015). One of the main advantages of implementing comic strips was that no previous artistic skills were required when using online comic strip generators. There was an obvious observed enhancement of the creative thinking, personal expression an