Integrating Comics Into Engineering Education To Promote Student Interest, Confidence, and Understanding.

The use of comics as an educational teaching tool is a practice that has existed for several decades but only recently begun to be utilized in STEM fields. The dramatic expansion in STEM comics through independent artists, book series, and video animation has illustrated the opportunity for the integration of art into STEM to improve educational approaches. Despite a continued general perception that comics are 'childish', comics have a unique and demonstrated potential for improving student enthusiasm, confidence, and understanding in complex concepts. The use of comics directly addresses one of the major obstacles to effective learning in chemical engineering education, in that many core concepts have an abstract nature with no obvious visual representation (such as fugacity) or have such complexity that the visual depiction is crucial for student understanding (such as thermodynamic cycles). Examples of real-world applications, demonstrations and experimentation can often help to facilitate learning, but presenting a visual learning tool that students can frequently return to can help make the concepts less abstract and more comprehensible. Further, by depicting characters that students can directly identify with, and utilizing dialogue that includes common questions asked by students, comics provide an opportunity for further engagement that other teaching tools do not have. In several chemical engineering courses at Northeastern University, comics have been integrated into courses to help facilitate improvement in student interest, confidence, and comprehension. Comics were produced in collaboration with professional artists as well as comics developed by the students themselves in their classes. Analyses of the impact of the comics has indicated a substantial improvement in student interest and confidence, while student understanding has either held steady or also improved depending on how the comics were integrated into the courses. This paper will discuss the development of these comics, different methods for implementing comics into courses, and the impact of the comics on student learning experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]