Via P.Z. Myers at Pharyngula, news that biologist and cartoonist (and Farm School favorite) Jay Hosler has a new book out, Optical Allusions.
I’ve written before, here and in comments at other blogs, about Dr. Hosler’s earlier titles, The Sandwalk Adventures: An Adventure in Evolution Told in Five Chapters and Clan Apis). He writes about the new book on his website; here’s an excerpt:
Optical Allusions is a science comic book funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation. The aim of this work is to develop and test a chapter of a non-majors biology text book in comic form. This particular chapter will contain 9-10 short stories focusing on different aspects of eye biology and evolution. The stories are linked by a common protagonist, Wrinkles the Wonder Brain, and his ongoing quest to find his employers’ lost eyeball.
Why a science comic? Well, the trend in science proficiency in the US is not a good one …
My hope is that comic stories will present science in an engaging fashion and provide students with a context that will help them retain the material. Each chapter will be followed by two pages of text that will expand upon the ideas in the story as well as provide study questions, etc.
You can find a PDF file with an excerpt of the new book here, and you can buy it from Active Synapse. And here‘s a 2005 NPR interview with Dr. Hosler.
Filed under: Books, Children's Books, Science |
Farm School, Farm House 
I particularly like the line “You can distill imagination but you can’t make an extra magic eye?”
There are some very creative bits in the excerpts I’ve seen, JoVE.