Thermochemistry in comic books: A didactic tool for teaching chemical concepts in high school

Abstract

Students can learn not only in school, but also in their daily life. Some terms, like heat, have different meanings in daily life and in the scientific context. When teaching, we should show this difference, but also work with both meanings simultaneously. We elaborated a comic book to teach introductory thermochemical concepts. Here we show its use in the classroom and how it can help high school students understand these concepts. In this qualitative research, specifically a case study, the comic book was used in a second-year public Brazilian high school class. We applied an introductory questionnaire to identify what the students previously knew about thermochemistry. After that, the students read the comic book and we did the experiments proposed in it. Then, the students evaluated the comic book and answered a questionnaire about the studied topics. We observed that the students had not previously used comic books in class and most of them considered that the language of comic books helped them understand the concepts. We conclude that using comic books contributed to the students' understanding of thermochemistry concepts.