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14520
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Paper Acceptance Letter
May 15, 2015
Dear Mr. /Ms. Lazarinis Fotis,
We are delighted to inform that your paper has been accepted for inclusion in 2015 10th International
Conference on Computer Science & Education (ICCSE 2015), which will be held in Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge
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Paper ID: 14520
Title: E-comics in teaching: evaluating and using comic strip creator tools for educational purposes
Submitter: Lazarinis Fotis
Sincerely yours,
Program Committee, ICCSE 2015
Email: iccse.2015@gmail.com
Website: http://ieee-iccse.org/
2015 10
th
International Conference on
Computer Science & Education (ICCSE 2015)
ICCSE 2015
E-comics in teaching: evaluating and using comic
strip creator tools for educational purposes
Fotis Lazarinis
Hellenic Open University
Patras, Greece
fotis.lazarinis@ac.eap.gr
Ageliki Mazaraki
Ministry of Education
Athens, Greece
amazaraki@sch.gr
Vassilios S. Verykios
Hellenic Open University
Patras, Greece
verykios@eap.gr
Chris Panagiotakopoulos
University of Patras
Patras, Greece
cpanag@upatras.gr
Abstract—In this paper we research the suitability of comic
strip creator tools for developing teaching material. A list of
criteria is formed based on the findings of previous research and
on the characteristics of comics which have been used effectively
in teaching in past works. The results of the evaluation of a
number of comic strip creator tools are presented and two cases
of developing e-comics with the use of these tools are discussed.
The main finding, is that despite some limitations, the tools can
be successfully utilized to create alternative and more appealing
representations of the teaching materials from teachers with no
specialized knowledge on painting or comic designing.
Keywords—e-comics; comic strips; comics in teaching;
storytelling
I. INTRODUCTION
Several comics have been developed for educational
purposes and have been used successfully in teaching. These
efforts, concerned with different subjects, educational levels
and diverse educational purposes. Comics as an educational
tool have the ability to motivate students [1][2]. The
combination of pictures and texts can improve learning. They
are also popular with children, since they are more appealing
than traditional educational approaches, especially among
younger children. Educational activities with comics have been
reported to develop critical thinking [3]. Comics are a form of
storytelling. As a medium, comics are a sequence of static
images which present a story. Since the pictures are still,
readers’ minds fill in the action. Thus, most of the work is done
between the panels (frames) by the readers’ mind, which could
be a powerful tool in teaching [4].
A lot of Web tools for constructing e-comics, commercial
or free are available on the internet. These tools are called strip
creators and their strips can also be shared in social networks.
They provide cards of comic graphics, background images,
characters and other objects which can be combined to form a
sequence of, mostly, static images. Some of them even support
the production of animations. Dialogues among the characters
are added as text balloons.
E-comics can be used in education in two different ways:
• By the teachers to develop educational materials. As
we do not expect teachers to have painting and artistic
skills, comic strip creators could be a powerful tool to
help them compose their educational scenarios in
comics.
• By students to create their own comics. The process of
creating comics is a means to develop creative
thinking, personal expression, literacy development,
and improve communication skills [5].
The aim of this paper is to examine the features provided
by comic strip creators in relation to their adequacy of being
used for educational purposes. Web comic strip tools provide
different features, so we aim at investigating these features
with respect to their suitability for educational purposes. Based
on the results of this comparative evaluation, examples of
educational scenarios are implemented to study the
effectiveness of the applications to support educational
scenarios.
II. RELATED WORK
Olson [6] researched the use of comic strips in the science
classroom as a methodology to promote science literacy by
increasing opportunities for students to read and discuss
science issues. The author concluded that using comic strips to
improve science literacy skills is beneficial. He also creates
short comic strips about two lab rats whose conversations can
motivate students to think about science and research.
Zimmerman [7] claims that comic strips provide the perfect
vehicle for learning and practicing language. He also notices
that the process of comic creation by students could help them
to improve their vocabulary and exercise their writing skills.
By using digital comics, students work collaboratively, which
furtherly improves their social skills [8].
Comics have been used in algebra teaching [9]. According
to the results presented in [9], students become less opposed to
participating in the learning process on this tough topic.
Additionally, the teachers who participated in this research
stated that drawings helped students achieve a better
understanding of the algebra symbolisms. At Ajou University
in Korea a team of professors had drawn 4-frame comic strips
to help their students in studying anatomy [10]. They noticed
that the grades of the students who read the comics were higher
than those who did not. Tatalovic [11] illustrated that science
can be communicated via single frame cartoons and short
comic strips.
U.S. Government work not protected by U.S. copyright
The 10th International Conference on
Computer Science & Education (ICCSE 2015)
July 22-24, 2015. Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge University, UK
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The role of comic strips in English reading comprehension
was investigated in [12]. Students of lower performance
received supplementary educational material in comic strips
and, as a result, they scored higher than their counterparts who
received only text representations.
Having students expressing their personal experiences as
conversational stories through comics, serves three vital
functions: a cognitive, a social and an emotional function [13].
Consequently, technological tools could be useful to encourage
children to storytelling, as well as to explore notions of
communication by defining new ways to approach
collaborative creativity and support group members.
III. AIMS & METHODOLOGY
In all the aforementioned studies it is concluded that there
is a positive impact of comic strips in teaching and learning.
Digital comics could be constructed in an easier way using
comic strip creator tools, thus avoiding the tedious process of
designing pictures. But do the available comic strip tools offer
suitable functions for successfully implementing educational
scenarios? Driven by this question, our research has the
following goals:
• To evaluate the features of comic strips on their
suitability for developing educational e-comics.
• To develop some sample teaching scenarios in order to
investigate the ability of the tools to support the aims
of the teachers.
To realize the first goal, we assembled a list of features
based on comic strips which have already been used in
educational activities. Furthermore, we considered the
observations made on relevant published works related to the
quality of the teaching material in comics. For the second
objective, we asked high school teachers to develop some
educational comics with some of the evaluated tools.
IV. DISCOVERING THE REQUIRED FEATURES
The panel length in comics is connected with the passage of
time [4]. Therefore, it appears that the restriction on the
number of panels that could be created, limits the possibilities
of plot development in story-telling. Furthermore, Gene Young
[2] claims that panel size can be used to emphasize the
information or the emotional content of a comic. Liu [12]
commented that novice students need small chunks of texts to
understand the concepts, while students with higher knowledge
on a topic need more complicated texts. In other words, the
comic strip tool should support large texts in the balloons and
many balloons per frame. In another study the researchers
considered the students' comments regarding flaws in the
comic strips [10]. One drawback noted was the awkward
illustrations of the comic strips. Another problem was that the
stories which consisted of up to four panels were too short.
The multimodality of individual communication requires
the teacher to convey messages with procedures that do not
only include oral and written language but also mathematical
symbols and diagrams, gestures, body postures, and facial
expressions [14]. The latter observation supports the above
findings on the necessity of providing different design options.
From these studies and the review of the comics depicted in
the papers, it is apparent that the supported designing features
of the comic strip tools have to be considered. They are
associated with the complexity and the variety of the images
that can be produced and thus, they affect the quality of the
visualised educational scenarios. The features related to the
variability of the strips that can be produced are:
• The number of panels supported per comic strip.
• The ability to adjust the panel size.
• The existence of different characters, objects and
background images.
• The ability to transform the size, position, color,
rotation, orientation and layer of the selected objects.
• The ability to transform the appearance of the comic
characters in order to express emotions, to change their
look or their posture.
In a recent study, a traditional teaching approach was
compared to a teaching method using comics. The comics
related to the understanding of concepts in economics [15]. The
pre-conceptual understanding in economics was taken as a
covariate in both cases. It was found that the comics approach
was superior to the traditional method and provided better
illustration of the concepts. The textual descriptions in the
comics helped in conveying the messages and in combination
with the images improved the understanding of the students.
Apparently, the ability to insert lengthy text descriptions to the
comic dialogue balloons in various human languages is
considered as a significant feature. The language of the
interface is also important for adoption of the tool by non-
English speaking users.
By using comic strip creators, students have a new
publishing medium [8]. Umaschi & Cassell [16] noticed that
peers were inspired to continue their work, by observing the
progress of the students’ work. In addition, teachers should be
able to communicate the educational material to their students
in diverse ways. Therefore, features such as printing, sharing,
embedding and posting, as well as saving the comics locally,
are features that could be important in selecting a tool.
Lazarinis and Pearson [17] presented an application which
allows educators to edit comic strips and associate specific
learning objectives through post-comic activities such as tests.
Assessment is an integral part of instruction, significant for
educators. Accordingly, properties related to the assessment
process could be an interesting attribute.
Collaborative work is a feature supported by many Web
tools. Since collaboration among students is an attitude that
teachers try to encourage, the collaboration features in e-comic
tools would be something worth having. Finally, considering
comic strip creators as computer applications, features related
to usability and user interface functionality are considered
important [18]. An interface supporting drag & drop or point
& click operations, could be useful to accelerate and facilitate
user tasks.
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Based on the above discussion, tools are evaluated on the
following high level characteristics:
• The designing features.
• The restriction in the number of comic panels and the
comic book creation features.
• The ability of the tools to run as Web or standalone
applications.
• The distribution of the software, i.e., commercial or
free software.
The first two items of the above list include all the features
discussed in the previous paragraphs, i.e. the ability to change
the panel size, to adjust the characters, etc.
V. RESULTS
A. Evaluation
Searching the Web and the literature we located more than
30 tools with which we could develop some form of comic
strips. Although all the tools were assessed, in this paper we
present the tools which were richer in features. Table I presents
the results of the evaluation. Some features were fully
supported while others were partially supported by the tools.
The evaluation took place between March 2014 and June 2014.
All the tools were used to create sample comics and their
features were recorded.
The general findings of the evaluation are:
• Web tools provide richer graphic libraries for comic
characters and item selection than the standalone
applications.
• The user interface is displayed in English language
only.
• Only few of the tools support sound recording or sound
embedding.
• All the examined tools provide features such as the
printing or the exporting of images.
• Most of the tools support comics publishing in their
online communities.
• Rating and assessment capabilities are restricted.
• All tools provide operating instructions or user
manuals.
• Almost all of the web tools require registration and
creation of a user profile.
• The support of non-English text in the text balloons is
limited.
• None of the tools support collaborative creation of
stories.
The commercial software provides more powerful
capabilities to develop narratives with a complex plot. But
there is also free software with significant capabilities. All the
tools provide a simple and friendly user interface, suitable for
young children, and may be proposed for comic creation
assignments to students.
‘Pixton for Schools’ appears to be the most complete web
tool. ‘Toondoo’ is a freeware Web tool which provides
extended designing and publication features. Its main limitation
is the number of possible panels per strip. However, this could
be overcome by creating the story as different strips, which
could be exported and used unified in a Web page or they
could be printed.
TABLE I. COMIC STRIP COMPARISON TABLE
***Extensive support, ** Satisfactory support, * Limited
support
Among the standalone applications, ‘Comic Lab’ provides
extended features and can be suggested for the construction of
comics based on photos or embedded premade images. Also,
‘Cartoon Story Maker’ is a free standalone application with
sufficient features that could support diverse educational
scenarios.
In general, it is concluded that these four applications
provide most of the required features, discussed in the previous
section, and could efficiently support the quick development of
educational comics by educators who would not otherwise be
able to develop customized comics.
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B. E-comic creation
The second step in our work was the creation of some
comic strips to test whether we can implement educational
scenarios using e-comics. The development was done by
educators teaching in various grades.
Fig. 1. A comic developed with Pixton for Schools for computer science
In total ten different comic strips were developed for
English language teaching, computer science, ancient Greek,
and mathematics. The help provided to the teachers was related
to technical issues only. The story, the design, the selection of
characters and the adaptation of characters to express emotions
was left to the teachers.
Figures 1 and 2 show two educational scenarios developed,
respectively, with Pixton for Schools and ToonDoo. The
educational objective of the first scenario was to introduce
students to algorithms, to help students understand "what is an
algorithm", as well as to raise discussion about the use and
terminology of algorithms in the classroom. The objective of
the second scenario was to teach some English language topics
in a more stimulating and appealing way. Observe that in both
comic strips the characters have different facial expressions
and body positions which express emotions and make the
subject look real and, therefore, the comic more realistic.
Fig. 2. A comic developed with ToonDoo for English language teaching
The first observation is that the e-comics are totally
different, which means that the tools provide several
characters, backgrounds, and other objects to build different
comic strips. Both comics were developed in approximately
one hour. There was no difficulty in comic creation as the tool
graphics supported sufficiently the predesigned comic scenario.
In fact, the exploration of the rich graphics provided by the
tools, helped the teachers in enhancing the original design that
they had in mind. The outcome was far more appealing, as it
was argued by the participants. The process of interacting with
the tool and the available options, led some teachers to
conceive new educational scenarios to develop in the future. In
this first experiment, we were only interested on the feasibility
of developing usable comics, and not on their actual impact on
education. This is currently being studied, but the initial results
are very promising.
The educational material could be accessed through a Web
browser or could be printed and distributed to the students.
Another option is the export of the comic as a set of images
which enables the image file creation from the comic data. The
image files could be used with other software, e.g. PowerPoint,
to support different aims.
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VI. CONCLUSIONS
In this paper, we presented a structured evaluation of comic
strip tools. A number of comic strip creators with various
features and functionality are available. The assessment criteria
were based on the conclusions and the comic strips presented
in published works on comics in education. Our main aim was
to understand whether the existing comic strip creation tools
could be used for developing teaching materials in the form of
storytelling. More specifically, we evaluated whether the
features of these tools are adequate for creating usable comic
strips for teaching. This could then speed up the process of
using comics in education, which according to previous
research are quite useful in educational material.
The main conclusion is that although the evaluated tools do
not offer all the desired functionality, they can be effectively
used for developing comics for educational purposes. The
development of e-comics in a short amount of time from
teachers with no painting skills is a proof that these tools are
capable of being used for enriching the teaching process with
alternative representations. Moreover, the abundance of
options, backgrounds, characters, and other objects helped the
teachers to improve their initial design. Some of their
limitations, e.g. limitation to the frames per comic strip, can be
overcome with the development of multiple comic strips, or
other simple technical interventions.
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