Guiding undergraduate students to collaborate in the design and development of concept cartoon with the support of TINS

摘要

TINS (Theme-based Inquiry Network Studio) is a webbased learning environment that was designed and developed by the research team lead by the first author and financially supported by the National Science Council in Taiwan. In this study, the authors guided two undergraduate male students to design and develop concept cartoons of combustion. TINS played important roles as a platform to support the communication among the researchers and the participated undergraduate students. TINS also provided software tools to store research information such as photos, files, and provided the possibilities of editing the design of concept cartoon in the power point format among the authors and the participating undergraduate students. We took literature review and a collaborative action research method to design and develop ten concept cartoons regarding to combustion. The characteristics of the concept cartoon developed by this research are two folds. One, we used photos taken by camera instead of hand-drawing pictures. Second, we added a guiding question for students to discuss about the science concepts embedded in the context of the concept cartoons. All participants gained professional development after this research.