Forum - View topicINTEREST: Italian Doctoral Student Uses Manga & Anime to Teach Astronomy & Physics
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Brent Allison
 Posts: 2444 Location: Athens-Clarke County, GA, USA |
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Incidentally, a science teacher named Christopher Meharg has been using anime as course-related material to introduce STEM-related topics:
http://www.animescience101.com/ |
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Daria Dall'Olio
Posts: 3 |
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Hello,
thanks for the notice! Christopher Mehag's blog is really an amazing work. It would be nice to get to know all the people who are using the manga approach to teaching and outreach. For example, we met Toshihiro Handa, a professor of astronomy at Kagoshima University in Japan, who wrote a book (in Japanese) on the astronomy references in the Star Blazers remake Space Battleship Yamato 2199. Surely there must be many others! Since we started in 2011 we have always focused on astronomy because that's the subject we study, so in our activities we can include the latest results from the research in astronomy. But I'm sure there may be something similar for other disciplines! |
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crazyidiot78
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Thanks for the shout out and there are many other anime that you could use for the sciences. A big one right now is Doctor Stone, which involves a lot of chemistry and physics, and I'm more of a bio guy so I haven't done much with it yet. Also I met a pair of women from Boston who are using Voltron to do some outreach classes at an observatory up there.
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CorneredAngel
 Posts: 854 Location: New York, NY |
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Using any kind of popular culture product to teach any kind of scientific or technological or medical concept - is not particularly new.
Such as: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jstrokecerebrovasdis.2016.10.005 Delivering Knowledge of Stroke to Parents Through Their Children Using a Manga for Stroke Education in Elementary School (recently published by a team of Japanese researchers in the Journal of Stroke & Cerebrovascular Diseases) |
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Jose Cruz
 Posts: 1798 Location: South America |
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That reminded me of the manga guides:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Manga_Guides I noticed there isn't a manga guide to economics. |
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crazyidiot78
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I know its not new, but it doesn't make it any less effective or fun. Also how many times do we see anime being used to teach, at least in the west. Thanks for the article, that is one I haven't seen yet. As to the manga guides, I haven't had a chance to look those over yet. |
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Gina Szanboti
Posts: 11627 |
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Is this really something people older than 8 are confused about? oO |
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Daria Dall'Olio
Posts: 3 |
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Thanks for the reference! I would also cite James Kakalios' book "The physics of superheroes" as one of the most famous examples of science popularization using popular culture. (Having been first published in 2005, it predates our project by 6 years). There are actually two approaches to using comics to teach science: the first is to write an entirely new comic whose purpose is to explain a topic; this is the case of the Manga Guides and of several others. It has received attention in several research papers that describe its effectiveness, like the one you mentioned (we cite some more on our website). The second approach is to use something that was not written with teaching in mind, but that is very famous: this is approach of both the "physics of superheroes" and of our project, and of other people mentioned in other replies. My impression is that this approach works quite well for one-off activities, like a visit to a planetarium or a science festival. In those case the available time is limited, so starting from something well-known is a quick way to get people's interest. Last edited by Daria Dall'Olio on Sat May 12, 2018 3:17 am; edited 1 time in total |
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Daria Dall'Olio
Posts: 3 |
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Yes! Unfortunately many people get confused by those concepts. Or in other cases they may know the difference from a theoretical point of view, but have no idea of how planets look like in the night sky. The same happens in other fields of science: for example, biologists also need to constantly explain what a gene is. I guess it has to do with those concepts being a kind of specialized knowledge that most people don't use every day. Even the manga and anime translators sometimes get the difference between star and planet wrong. In Japanese, when naming a star or a planet (for example, as in "the star Sirius" or "the planet Mars") the same kanji is used for star and planet. So translating from Japanese requires prior knowledge of whether the object is a planet or a star. This may not be self-evident in the case of a fictional object. Some Italian dubs of many anime from the 1970s and 1980s often confused the two terms. So when I talk about UFO Robot Grendizer (one of the most famous anime in Italy) one of first things I do is to ask where do the villains come from, and see if people answer "planet Vega" or "star Vega" 
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Kadmos1
 Posts: 13626 Location: In Phoenix but has an 85308 ZIP |
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Other than sexism, I wonder what you could teach about using harem anime.
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