Narrative, visual, and didactic choices in the Supertroupers Project: designing a digital comic on energy

Abstract

This paper reports on the design of a digital comic episode for teaching the concept of energy in secondary education. Developed through a collaboration between physics education researchers, a scriptwriter, and an illustrator, the episode introduces energy-related key ideas—such as physical state, transfer, conservation, and sources—through a fictional narrative centred on the construction of an hipotetical energy-generating device. The design was guided by a combined framework of Design-Based Research and the Model of Educational Reconstruction, allowing for alignment between scientific content, student conceptions, and didactic structuring. Classroom testing of a prototype in France and Spain informed several revisions, including clearer sequencing of environmental issues and enhanced narrative coherence. The final resource remains to be tested. It is part of a multilingual series and is accompanied by teacher support materials. This case illustrates the affordances and boundaries of DBR and MER for designing multimodal educational artefacts in international contexts.