Comic strips for electrical and electronic engineering - a novel genre

Abstract

This article reports on the use of comic strips in engineering laboratory sessions. Engineering students tend to be visual learners, and resources that depict circuit behaviour in terms of a sequence of figures rather than just mathematics or verbal descriptions, could appeal more to the students. Therefore, they could provide another perspective with which students could understand circuit behaviour. The method of testing involved the researcher as observer-participant during two undergraduate engineering laboratory sessions at the University of Malta. The data were collected through the researcher’s observations and interactions with students while participating in the laboratory sessions, and also through a short questionnaire, which was given to the students at the end of the session. Feedback from some electrical engineering lecturers about the nature of the resources was also sought. The results indicate that the learning aids were considered helpful for understanding the behaviour of the circuits in question. The students also commented that such qualitative resources make learning engineering more fun.