Mickey Mouse at the CERN

The most famous laboratory of the year is certanly the CERN thanks to the discovery of a new boson that it seems equal to the boson predicted by Peter Higgs et al.
CERN was established in 1952 and formed in 1954. Currently the experiments are carried with the LHC (Large Hadron Collider), but the previous accelerator ring was LEP, Large Electron-Positron Collider, that was used from 1989 to 2000. In particular in 1985 Alessandro Bencivenni, an italian disney writer, went at CERN and, inspired by the announced LEP, he wrote a story setted at the swiss laboratory, Mickey Mouse and the nuclear accelerator (Topolino e l'acceleratore nucleare), never published in english, so I decided to translate the cartoons about the explanation of the device and the experiment.
The popularizer is Atomo Bleep-Bleep, a charachter created by Romano Scarpa in Mickey Mouse and the Delta Dimension (first italian edition: 1959; first english edition: 1981 in Great Britain). I hope to write something about Atomo Bleep-Bleep, Doctor Einmug and the Delta Dimension in a future post, but for now I hope you can enjoy with this extract from the story, drawned by Massimo De Vita (I must remember that copyright is Disney):

Science education and comics

posted by @ulaulaman about #science #physics #comics #UncleScrooge

In 2002 F. Javier Perales-Palacios and José M. Vílchez-González studied the impact of comics and cartoons in the study of physics. They arrived at the following conclusions:

1. Teaching physics by showing cartoons constituted a clear incentive in the students' attitude towards the subject.⁽¹⁾
2. Students' misconceptions to a certain degree parallel the incorrect physics in the cartoons. It is quite possible that the cartoons have reinforced these misconceptions from an early age.⁽¹⁾
3. Use of TV in the classroom to present real images (for instance, the behaviour of bodies orbiting the Earth, the movement of passengers in a bus, and so on) and contrast the real and the fictitious planes facilitates conceptual change.⁽¹⁾
4. This type of strategy can bring physics teaching closer to the communications media that most interest the students, and therefore reduce the barrier between School Science and everyday knowledge.⁽¹⁾
5. The image of science and scientists presented in the cartoons was typical and students who participated in the experiment also held this stereotyped image.⁽¹⁾
6. There was a great diversity in the results between individuals and between groups. (...) The student group clearly surpassed the teachers in the number of phenomena identified.⁽¹⁾

In particular the points 2. (the incorrect physics in cartoon) and 5. (the stereotypes about science and scientists) are deepen in a recent paper by the same two authors:

We have been able to ascertain that cartoons do distort the image of science and its environment. Very often it is presented as something distant and far-removed from everyday life, thus hiding its basic objectives (explaining the world that surrounds us) under meaningless headings that make use of 'strange' (often mistaken) terms or huge and meaningless mathematical expressions. This occurs even for those familiar with the subject matter (thereby strengthening the elitist image of science), and sometimes even directly presenting some of the preconceived ideas that the bibliography acknowledges as being characteristic of adolescents. Comics also offer a distorted image of these questions, similar to the one that is presented in cartoons 'if they were silent'.⁽²⁾

The two researchers are warry about the influence of these two media, but I think that they forgot (read, for example, the point 1. of the 2002's paper) the theacher's key role in the education. Comics, indeed, are a great opportunity to introduce in a very simple way physics in classroom:

(...) educators should not underestimate the importance of learners’ interests. These interests can work for us in two ways. They can provide hooks, and they offer context. To most physics teachers, physics is clearly a subject that explores the most fundamental aspects of nature, which encompasses the smallest and largest scales we can envisage, and which deals with the most fascinating questions and phenomena. Some of our students feel the same, and come to classes with an enthusiasm to learn more. Unfortunately, however, many students do not initially share our enthusiasms.
It is so much easier to learn when we are interested in the subject matter. Learning is most effective when we are motivated to learn, and engaged by the learning process.⁽³⁾