Comic Aims to Inspire Kids’ Interest in Science
After numerous starts and stops, a group of Cottrell Scholars led by Snezana Stanimirovic has produced a comic strip for elementary school students highlighting the life and research of scientists.
“It has been a long journey, but the final product is beautiful,” said CS 2009 Stanimirovic, University of Wisconsin Madison. “It shows how cool and creative scientific work can be, and we hope it encourages more young people to aspire to STEM careers.”
Funded by the Research Corporation for Science Advancement and the Astronomy Department at the University of Wisconsin – Madison, the comic is a collaboration between a team of Cottrell Scholars (in addition to Stanimirovic, CS 2010 Sarbajit Banerjee, Texas A&M; CS 1999 Karen Bjorkman, University of Toledo; CS 2009 Mike Gladders, University of Chicago; and CS 2009 Yadong Yin, University of California, Riverside) and science illustrator Jan Lin, with assistance from Philip “Bo” Hammer, University of Chicago. The story was developed and initial sketches of characters done by physicist-artist team Rebecca Thompson and David Ellis, the creators of Spectra.
The comic strip, "The Secret of a Bok Globule," is available for download here.
Stanimirovic said the group developed the idea at the 2012 Cottrell Scholars Conference during a discussion about designing a novel outreach project to encourage young people’s interest in science.
“We decided that we needed to start working early on to address that because there are studies that show early middle school is a critical time, and at that point girls especially start to decide that science is not for them,” Stanimirovic said. “We thought a little comic strip might be able to show how exciting it is to look at something through a telescope, or to discover something new.”
Seed funding from RCSA helped the group produce a story, characters and some basic sketches, but finding an artist interested in the project was a challenge. The project bogged down as one promising lead after another failed to materialize.
After five years, Stanimirovic ended up sending money back to RCSA. “It was one of those projects that was a nice idea, but we couldn’t make it happen,” she said.
Then in July 2020, as a last-ditch effort to save the project, Stanimirovic decided to put out a call for an illustrator on Facebook. Right away she received a response from Lin, an experienced educational illustrator who lives in Madison and always wanted to try her hand at a comic strip.
The result of their collaboration is “Galaxy Scouts: Space-Ventures with Stella and Riley," a comic series aimed at students in the 2nd-4th grades. It follows two 10-year-olds, Stella and Riley, and their travels through space.
What starts as a class visit to the famous telescope at Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles turns into a space adventure, with Stella and Riley getting sucked through the telescope and transported to Mars by a magical character with a hidden agenda.
Along the way, they meet and talk with the Mars Rover, fly through space in special suits, and get a real assignment – to figure out what’s hiding inside the Bok Nebula, a place where new stars form.
“Most comics have a mystery at the end that drives readers to want to see the next one,” Stanimirovic said. “That’s very important to capture kids’ attention.”
Now, the team is trying to get the comic into young readers’ hands so they can see how they like it. Among other outreach ideas, Stanimirovic hopes to tap into the pool of Cottrell Scholars, who are physicists, chemists and astronomers from all sorts of different institutions, to get the comic out to children and teachers who might enjoy it, as well as to identify topics for future comic stories highlighting the research of Cottrell Scholars.
“It would be wonderful if this turns out to be an educational tool that kids respond to and science teachers can use in the classroom or for additional reading,” she said. “Eventually, we would like to do three comic strips, with accompanying activity books with simple exercises to introduce kids to scientific concepts in a fun and playful way.”
The activity books are funded through a University of Wisconsin Baldwin grant.
A second comic strip, "The Secret of the Bullet Cluster," is in progress.
“The second one will be harder, with a few scenes focusing on dark matter,” Stanimirovic said. “As I’m putting together a script, I’m so glad we have something to show and the project is moving ahead. Ideally, if there is enough interest, we can continue with the development of future comic strips.”
