eLearning through comic strips,fun in eLearning

Very few of us would deny that
cartoons played an important role in initial days of our life. Mostly it was for fun.  But did we ever realize that many of them were trying to make us learn something. They were interspersed in between our favourite comic strips and came in the form of “did you know” strips.

In the
present web 2.0 context we all know Wikipedia is a great soure of information to us. But did we ever want it to be a bit more interesting. Look at this. It contains few Wikipedia articles converted to comic strip and compare the difference it makes in our understanding of the subject. For example – an entry for “apples and oranges” in Wikipedia will look like this. Same entry converted to a comic strip will look like this.

And look at what I created using Adobe Captivate 4. Click here or at the image below to view the file.

How this was created –

We’ve used the new Drawing tool bar, different type of text captions and image resizing features of Adobe Captivate 4. The strip boxes with different background colors were created using the new drawing tool bar. It’s feature of polygon and the ability of to add text helped us create the effects which have been used. It’s ellipse feature was used to create the thinking box. Adobe Captivate has many types of text captions which seems so natural to be used in this scenario. The main character was created using a simple bitmap editor. But we can use Adobe Photoshop CS4 (a part of the new Adobe eLearning Suite) for creating better ones. And then we used image resize feature to break the monotony of single character in the strip. We resized the character in every box so that it looks different and can be reused to create different effect.We also used perpetual button widget for cleaner navigation.

Files discussed in this post –

Adobe Captivate project(.cp) file – Download