Capturing Early Eager Learners with Chemistry Comics

By Colleen Kelley

The practice of using case studies in higher education has been an effective tool for teaching everything from medicine to law. These case studies are based on ‘real life’ scenarios and are often framed as a mystery to solve.

Colleen Kelley has embraced the use of case studies in her chemistry courses for the past few decades. She has used them in graduate-level courses in medicinal chemistry and most recently in her 100-level course at the University of Arizona.

Colleen’s students have found that the case studies enriched their understanding of chemical concepts and connect those concepts to everyday life. This led Dr. Kelley to ask the questions, “Could we use case studies, framed in an age-appropriate manner, to teach a much younger audience?” and “Can early eager learners master chemical concepts from carefully scaffolded chemistry mysteries?”

She wanted to find out, so she began creating a series of chemistry mysteries in a comic book format for students ages 8 to 12.

Enjoy this page from The Case of the Vanishing Van Gogh!

The M.C. Detective Agency: Chemical Solutions Required is a graphic novel (comic book) that teaches chemistry to kids ages 8–12. This graphic novel envelops a cleverly concealed chemistry curriculum within the stories of twins Poppi and Ray, who solve mysteries using chemistry. These sibling sleuths have many adventures, including traveling back in time to rescue the Radium Girls, attending a modern day rock concert to save a vanishing Van Gogh, and swimming in a bottle of Chanel No. 5 to find the hiding aldehydes. The readers eventually discover that M.C. is Marie Curie, hence the names Poppi (Polonium), Ray (Radium) and Granny Eve (Marie’s Curie’s youngest daughter).

The twelve mysteries included in the graphic novel scaffold the sequence of learning objectives found in a 100-level chemistry curriculum. The characters in The M.C. Detective Agency are by design not human and instead look like the molecules or elements they represent. Colleen did this so that all kids could connect with the characters, regardless of gender or race, making this graphic novel truly inclusive.

Colleen adds that another reason the characters look like the elements or molecules they represent is to get early learners used to chemical symbols. “What I am discovering in my research is that a key to mastering chemistry in high school or college is to introduce chemical symbols to kids close to the same

“I found that it was FUN … like that I could read a story, and then I can understand what I learned from a story, and then I could do a math-type-thing. It was new … but it was cool, too.”

—Fiona, 5th grade student, Irvine, CA public school