European Co-construction of a Science Webcomics Series : "Bombastics"

This project aims to provide science teachers with original and motivating teaching resources on science, in particular on climate, energy and biodiversity. The need for resources on these subjects stems from the fact that they have very recently been introduced or reinforced in European science programmes. This common context has motivated the implementation of our project at a transnational level, so that the resources produced will be useful to the entire European teaching community, and beyond. In recent years, a major international effort has been devoted to producing resources on these subjects. Most of these projects focus on education about their impacts and the actions needed to mitigate and adapt to them. In addition to these essential approaches, our project aims to develop educational resources that focus on the scientific foundations at the heart of these issues. The underlying idea is that understanding the conceptual bases of climate, energy and biodiversity is a fundamental key to citizenship education, enabling pupils to gain confidence in what scientists say and to develop their critical faculties.

The aim of this project was to bring together the expertise of a dozen scientific teaching institutions and research groups, as well as artists specialising in the use of comics to communicate science, to co-create a series of eight digital comics. The series is based on major themes chosen by the collective to help build a scientific culture for all citizens. For each comic episode, the intention is to bring out the pupils' initial conceptions of the subject, to pose the scientific problem and to initiate class work to build up the concepts involved. For each subject, an associated teaching pack has been developed, enabling teachers to engage their pupils in the construction of the scientific concepts involved. The comic strip series and its resources have been designed using a didactic engineering methodology, taking into account the results of didactic research into pupils' difficulties and existing didactic approaches.

1) A kick-off meeting bringing together all the members of the consortium, the aim of which was to present the conditions and procedures for implementing the project, and to discuss and refine the overall methodology for the various project activities. On this occasion, thematic groups were defined for each episode, bringing together all the researchers involved in the theme and tasked with working on the co-construction of the episode and the teaching resources. For each thematic group, a thematic coordinator was appointed to take charge of planning and reporting on the meetings of the thematic groups. 2) Theme group meetings: these were scheduled from the design stage of each episode and each resource through to the implementation of their final versions on the digital platform. In particular, they provided an opportunity to compare the different school curricula on each theme and select the key concepts at the intersection of these curricula, to share a bibliographical summary of the research literature on science education concerning these key concepts, and to work in collaboration with the artistic team. 3) The 3 Summer Workshops scheduled each summer provided an opportunity to structure the progress of the production of th

The end result of the project is a series of digital comics designed for science education, called ‘Les Grandiloquents’, available free of charge on the grandiloquents.fr website (and translated into 6 languages). In addition to the first pilot episode on blood circulation, the 6 new finalised episodes cover the themes of gravitation, the theory of evolution, climate, biodiversity, energy and the ocean. For each theme, educational content is provided to build complete classroom sequences using the comic strip episode. These consist of a summary of the pupils' points of view, a presentation of the teaching approach developed, historical and epistemological perspectives, ways of using the comic strip, additional resources and examples of teaching sequences. In relation to existing resources on the themes covered, the resources we designed aimed to be both : - be original and motivating, thanks to the medium of digital comics and the expertise of the scriptwriter and illustrator. - be specifically designed for use in the classroom and adapted to the new school curricula, - focus on the construction of fundamental scientific concepts, - be based on the most recent research in science education on the subjects concerned.