Capstone Draft!

Hey guys!  I’ve spent this last weekend working on my capstone like a mad woman, and as of now I have the whole thing drafted, and illustrations sketched for the first chapter.  Tomorrow I’m turning in my work so far to my faculty mentors, and I’m going to be editing it and illustrating the rest of it over this next week.  The draft to be graded is due next Monday.

It’s a little different than the stories I’ve posted on this site previously.  It’s not so much of a comic as an illustrated short story in six chapters, and it’s two primary goals are to entertain and to teach some basic calculus.   I’ve got a lot of interest in using comics for education, and this is something I’m doing to explore that idea.

My thought process is that a lot of people get into a disciplinary mind set and have trouble communicating outside of their discipline.  They want anyone they’re trying to share information with to share their passion for that subject and be fluent in the language of that discipline.  It makes it hard to communicate with people who don’t have that expertise.  But it doesn’t have to be that way!  I went to a fantastic physics presentation as a field trip in high school, and the speaker was so much fun to listen to, and so good at conveying really complicated ideas and research, research which had won his team the Nobel prize, that I went home and was teaching my family all about it at the dinner table.  I remember my teacher telling us on the bus ride back that more people like him should teach, because if they did, we’d have more kids crazy about science.  It stuck with me.

When I was a kid, I played a lot of educational video games.  I loved Math Blaster, Dr. Quandry’s Island, Trudy’s Time and Place, even Reader Rabbit.  There were a couple of summers where my parents insisted that my sister and I do some kind of math study every weekday, and Math Blaster was one of the options.  We loved that game, loved the problem solving, and loved that everything we were doing in the game eventually led to us defeating the terrible monkey king!  We had all the cut scenes memorized, it was fantastic.

Going through high school and college, I’ve met more and more people who hate math.  They find it difficult and boring.  And because schools have no funding, the lower level math classes at colleges like mine are larger and larger, with fewer sections and more classes being taught online.  This doesn’t help people who already don’t like math to learn.

So what I’ve set out to do is teach math through storytelling.  I’m not a math major, but I made it through Calc II before I decided that what I wanted was to tell stories, and I didn’t need a physics degree to work physics or math into my stories, I just needed to stay exposed and engaged and keep talking to people who love this stuff.   The math in my capstone is all from Calc I.  I see it as supplementary material for a Calc I class, or review material for some other class which draws from Calc I.

As soon as this blog post is up, I’m going to go post chapter 1, in it’s rough form.  It will be replaced by a more polished version as that version is done.  Additional chapters will go up as I finish the illustrations.

This is a work in progress, so please feel free to leave feedback!  There may be typos, math mistakes, or other errors, and I want to catch them all before putting out the finished version.  You have a chance to help make this project the best it can be.  I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Thanks,

–Allison