Teaching Engineering through Comic Books

ChE Teaching Professor Lucas Landherr has been awarded the Provost Advancing Teaching and Learning Grant based on his proposal to develop science comics to improve the undergraduate engineering education. The crux of the proposal was designed to address difficulties that students, and particularly visual learners, have when trying to understand highly theoretical concepts that cannot be easily shown in the classroom setting. Through comics, educators can create visual media addressing the difficult subject matter that can then be used as educational tools to improve understanding and comprehension for all students; the goal of the project will be to produce and use these science comics in multiple courses to enhance student learning.

This project was in part inspired by his experience writing comics for the last seven years, and the difficulty in teaching course content that has no physical basis. Northeastern has a wide range of excellent professional artists interested in working on the project, with the science comics produced to be incorporated in several engineering courses next year.

Dr. Landherr will also be working with students in Art and Design to create additional science comics, with the challenges of depicting complex theory through visual media hopefully contributing to improve the curriculum of arts and humanities.

Dr. Lucas Landherr, a Stoneham native, received his Bachelor’s degree from Lafayette College in 2005 with an honors thesis studying drag-reducing polymers. He then completed his Ph.D. at Cornell University in 2010, developing and characterizing thin polymer films and brushes as nanoscale lubricants. While at Cornell, he received a GK-12 NSF Fellowship, with which he designed curriculum and physics experiments for high school classrooms. Most recently, Dr. Landherr completed an NRC Postdoctoral Research Associateship with the National Institute of Standards and Technology in 2012, where he conducted research on polymeric interactions with superhydrophobic surfaces.

Learn more about Lucas’s exciting achievement here.