Comics/Cartoons/Graphic Novels

Reflection

This comic is created in partnership with Ami Rivera. The title of our comic is “Cellular Friendship.” The target audience of this comic is fifth grade science students. The lesson we are trying to teach is that animal and plant cells have some similarities and differences that make them unique. This comic should be shown to the students before they study cells in science class.

To create this comic we used the ADDIE instructional design process. First we analyzed that the fifth grade students were having trouble understanding the difference between plant and animal cells. Then Ami designed a story sequence of actions and dialogue between the two cell characters. After that, I developed the comic in Canva by finding cell clip art, speech bubbles, and adding text to create the comic. Ami teaches STEM and could implement the comic in her classroom with her students during a unit on cells. After that we could evaluate how effective the comic was at teaching the students about cell differences.

Looking at the comic before they start the unit would use Mayer’s multimedia principle that is called the pre-training principle. This principle means that students will learn better when they have some pre-training in key concepts and names. The comic that we created uses the vocabulary terms cell wall, chloroplast, mitochondria, and vacuole. Seeing these terms ahead of time can help students understand them better later. The second multimedia principle that we used was the concretizing principle. In this principle we presented unfamiliar material like the vocabulary, in a way that relates it to familiar knowledge like making friends with someone who is different from you.  The third multimedia principle that we used is the personalization principle, which is when information is presented in a conversational style instead of formal talking. In this comic the two cells are talking informally like in a conversation that friends would have. Lastly, we also used the multimedia principle which states that words and pictures are better than just words or pictures alone.

The elements of art that we used in this comic were mainly focused on using consistent colors and shapes to represent our different plant and animal cell characters. When the plant cell glows green, the green color is used to represent her chloroplast using sunlight to make food. The main principle of design used to create each scene in the comic was balance. We had to balance where the characters were placed on the page as well as having enough room for the text to fit. We also tried to use multiple ways of framing the characters in the layout including full shots of the characters and cropped close ups to make it interesting.

The difference between comics, cartoons, and graphic novels is the length and depth of the storytelling. Cartoons are short and funny. Comics tell longer stories with more content. Sometimes comics can be serialized and parts of the story are printed over months or years. Graphic novels are longer than comic books and sometimes take a published novel and re-tell it through pictures and dialogue. Cartoons and comics would be best to use in the classroom for teaching new vocabulary and concepts through pictures and short dialogue. Graphic novels would be best for using in the language arts classroom during student choice reading time.

The main challenge that I had with completing the assignment revolved around two main things. My first challenge was that Ami’s script for our comic required pictures of cells for the characters and none of the comic websites that were suggested for our class to use had any pictures of cells on them. I finally decided to use Canva because I have a lot of experience using it and they have a huge clip art collection, including cells. The second challenge I had was that Ami wrote a lot of dialogue for our characters and I quickly realized I was never going to fit in all in the comic, so I had to choose the most important parts and cut out the unimportant ones. I think that overall, it really came together well and it taught me that I could get my art students to create comics of things we are studying in art class like the color wheel, or even famous artists!