EDCI 337

Updated: September 24, 2025
Authors: Caelan Street

This project presents an opportunity to implement various teaching strategies, aiming to create a more effective and lasting learning experience. I am creating this comic to provide a more engaging and easier learning experience of the digestive system. I hope this comic will help kids enjoy learning. I chose this topic because I remember struggling to learn similar items in middle school. I struggled to relate to it because I couldn’t interact with it, and I think that a comic book is a great way to help kids relate positively to the material and enhance their learning. My goals for this project are to animate and narrate the journey of a sandwich through the digestive system to make this process easier to understand and imagine for young minds.

---

THE PROCESS

Understand (Discover, Interpret, Specify)

DESCRIBE THE CHALLENGE:

• I remember when I was in middle school trying to learn about the digestive system my teachers focus was always to give us a text book, and tell us to memorize terms and the order in which processes happen. This system was not helpful as this whole idea of digestion was rather abstract and I could never see it happening, I think that learning this through a comic would help it to feel more realistic and be a much more engaging way to learn the same information in a more effective way.

CONTEXT AND AUDIENCE:

• My target audience for this comic book is later elementary but primarily middle school aged students (ages 10-14). At this stage in education, students are still developing their more abstract thinking skills, but still do the most learning when it is tied to real world examples they can easily relate to. As students transition from elementary to middle school they are learning that there are new standards in school but still have that childhood curiosity, so a comic book is a fun way to help them experience more advanced material through a fun childhood way.
• Typically students are interested in learning how their body works but struggle to learn through a long scientific explanation. Students succeed when the information is delivered in more bite sized pieces with clear connections to everyday life. The characters and images make the learning process more fun and engaging which will also lead to better understanding of the concepts. The comic format is perfect because it combines the best of both worlds: fun and engaging images to display the material as well as shorter pieces of text that are easier to digest and reinforce the images.
• In more extreme cases, students can struggle with science due to differences in how they learn, there is also the possibility of having a different first language or various other behind-the-scenes struggles. In cases like these, traditional textbook learning could cause frustration, lowered self-esteem, and many more complications. Comic books can help reconnect these kids with learning as it is an easier way to interact in a more simplistic way with the material. There are less scientific words for people who may not be fluent in the language they are learning for example. As the ted talk mentioned it also allows for the students to learn at their own pace. They have a remote control and can read and reread at their leisure if they didn’t understand a concept the first time.
• Generally speaking, middle school students are motivated by three things: curiosity, humor, and relatability. Middle school is a social time for kids and spend lots of time joking around and sharing things they find funny. As far as behavior goes, I can’t think of a student who wouldn’t be familiar at least with the idea of comic books or some kind of cartoon entertainment. Therefore, using this style makes the material they are learning feel that much more natural and engaging. By combining the students interests and strengths with the material they are learning from we can more effectively connect with their daily lives, making a bigger impact on their learning.

POV STATEMENT:

• A middle school student who struggles to stay engaged with science for any reason whether they don’t prefer the subject or maybe they have some learning challenges needs a fun and engaging learning method. A story based learning approach of the digestive system is a fantastic way to help kids connect abstract information to themselves. It also helps kids to better remember the process at a deeper level meaning they won’t immediately forget everything after their next term test. Last but not least, this helps kids to feel more confident in their understanding regardless of different learning styles or abilities.

LEARNING OBJECTIVES:

• Students should be able to explain the main processes of the digestive system (ingestion, digestion, absorption, transport, elimination) and identify the order in which these step occur.
• Students will explain the role of the small and large intestines.
• Students will recognize the difference between mechanical digestion and chemical digestion.

Plan (Ideate, Sketch, Elaborate)

IDEATION:

• At first I was trying to think of something that I knew about or a skill I had that I could pass on, but as I thought about it, I didn’t really see how these skills would fit into a comic style learning tool. So I thought back to my school experience and remembered in Gr. 6 we had a project where we drew a monster to become more familiar with parts of the body and the whole class had lots of fun. Then I thought about a conversation I had this last week with a friend who is in science and currently learning about the digestive system and and she explained it to me I was trying to picture what she was describing. So I thought, if I could use some visual help with this, I’m sure it would benefit others to.
• My most promising prototype is a comic called “A Journey Through the Digestive”, which describes a story where food is the main character travelling through someone’s digestive system. This comic book will transform science from a stereotypical textbook to a fun and engaging adventure!

STORYBOARD OR SCRIPT:

PRINCIPLES APPLIED:

• Dual coding theory principle: As the brain has two separate systems, one built for interpreting language and verbal information and the second built to analyze images, by using both text and images, we can increase the brain’s capacity to retain information, as each system has its own capacity.
• Contiguity principle: This is when you display your narrative and images adjacent to each other as you image reinforces the text, enhancing the learning experience and promoting long-term retention.
• Segmenting principle: The idea is that breaking down big ideas, such as the digestive system, into smaller pieces helps us to gain a foundation and then build on it. In my comic, I took the digestive system (big idea) and broke it down into smaller processes that are 1-2 slides in length and help to learn the system in smaller, more manageable pieces.
• Personalization principle: The principle that conversational language is more effective at communicating information than a super academic or professional tone. I made sure not to use super scientific terms and instead explained the systems using language a middle school student could understand.

Create and Share the Prototype

PEER FEEDBACK:

• After reading the feedback from my group, I have a good understanding of my strengths and areas of improvement. Some things that I did well were teaching the journey of the digestive system through a fun and engaging mascot. I was also told that the narrative and story would resonate well with a younger audience and be easy to digest. I was also told that the relation to my own middle school experiences helped to show my own connection and describe how effective a comic could be. I also clearly laid out my target audience and the context for the story. Lastly, I was told that I did a good job not overloading the audience with narrative, and my level of language was at a good level for a younger audience.
• Some improvement ideas I received were to not mash up the sandwich character in the stomach. This is because the sandwich is the protagonist, and mashing it up could come across as upsetting. Instead, it was suggested to me to have the stomach and intestines ask for parts of the sandwich and the sandwich to give them willingly instead of taking these parts by force. The sandwich should be collaborating with the digestive system and work on the same team. Other than that, I didn’t receive any questions or criticism.

Reflect and Refine

TEAM REFLECTION:

• Some things that worked well throughout this project I think, were first of all the template. I think that having this template really helped me break down the project into smaller sections, just like the segmenting principle. I think thanks to this template I was able to reflect more in depth on what we are trying to accomplish through this project, and that has helped me get more out of it. It has also helped me to stay organized. I also think that the peer feedback was a good system because it allows you to get others’ perspectives on things you may have missed or miscommunicated. It’s also helpful just to have someone look over it for the first time and give you their ideas on it, as it can be challenging to be self-critical. Finally, I think this reflection style has helped me to analyze why I have done certain things and reinforced the material we are learning through this project.
• A couple of things I would change are maybe making groups of three instead of two, as I just found I didn’t have a lot of feedback to reflect on. Another option would be to have 1-2 quick sentences from the professor, although I understand you have lots of students. Other than that, I think the process has gone quite smoothly. I couple of revisions I have made since receiving my peer feedback were to change the scenes where the sandwich gets mashed up or pulled apart, and instead will make it more of a collaborative, friendly dynamic where the sandwich is asked if the intestines and stomach can have these parts. This is the main criticism I received, so I made sure there was no violence in my final draft.
• Some of comics biggest attributes are: dual coding, allowing the brain to maximize it’s capacity by stimulating two different systems. Engagement, comics engage their audience in a way textbooks don’t they hook and entertain the reader while teaching them. Storytelling ability can make abstract concepts like the digestive system feel more concrete, it can personify the material in a way that resonates with readers. Comics are also very accessible, it can make learning simpler for people who maybe struggle with reading or don’t have education in their primary language. Some limitations of this form of learning are: cognitive overload, you must be careful to not overload panels with too much text and images, this can cause a reader to miss the main point of the panel. Oversimplification, of course the point of this comic is to break a bigger concept down into smaller pieces, however if you tried to teach brain surgery through a comic, it’d be impossible to capture everything here leading to a significantly simpler understanding of this process. Another issue could be the variability in how people interpret the images we use, different people will focus on different aspects of a picture or draw different conclusions. Finally, writing comic books takes lots of time, you need good design skills as well as communication to make sure you make the most of your limited narrative space.
• These strengths and limitations are based on Mayer’s article Theories of Multimedia Learning (2001), he wrote about the importance of dual coding, how the brain absorbs data through two separate pathways, language and images. He discussed the importance of using both of these pathways to maximize the brain’s absorption of information. The storytelling point is based on Mayer’s segmenting principle when he describes how breaking down large concepts into smaller steps can make learning much easier for students and lead to long-term retention. Mayer also talked about how cognitive overload hurts someone’s ability to learn. You can think of your brain like a sponge, it will absorb liquid up to a point but once it’s full, it stops absorbing water, or water it does absorb forces other water out. The same idea applies to our brains’ learning.

INDIVIDUAL REFLECTIONS:

• I worked to brainstorm an idea that would fit nicely into a comic format and that would be a lesson better learnt through a comic. Once I settled on the digestive system, my next challenge was breaking this huge system into smaller pieces to fit into comic book panels. In this step, I also brainstormed what pictures I could include and what I wanted my narrative to look like. My role in peer feedback was to read through their prototypes and look for areas of improvement. I tried to look for small areas that could have been overlooked during their own reflection. My peers did the same thing for me; they looked through my prototype and looked for feedback. I received some great ideas to make my main sandwich character collaborate with the digestive system instead of being robbed. The only thing I can think of that could improve about this project is the peer feedback, I found it was quite limited and therefore less effective than it may have been if we’d had more time and chances to look over each others work.