Quiénes somos

Supertroupers is an open access educational webcomic series. Science, comics and theatre come together on screen to teach life science and physics through the lens of historical fiction.

This webcomic series is an anthology series (episodes are independent) that presents the major scientific questions that students discover in secondary school science classes in Europe: biodiversity and the theory of evolution, the Earth, the ocean and the climate, energy and resources.

ECOSCOMICS, an Erasmus+ project to develop the series on a European scale.

ECOSCOMICS is a European Erasmus+ project for cooperative partnerships in school education led by Stimuli association, from 2022 to 2025 (n°2021-1-FR01-KA220-SCH-000030110).

Thanks to the support of the European Union, Stimuli's expertise in educational comics and that of a dozen European science teaching institutions and research groups are being brought together to develop the series on a large scale. During the Ecoscomics project, 8 episodes of Supertroupers will be available for teachers and students in France, Germany, Spain, Poland and Portugal.

Backstage

Supertroupers is the result of collaboration between an artistic team and a research team.

The artistic team is made up of Lau Bergey - scriptwriter and series founder, Barbara Govin - illustrator, and Gauthier Mesnil-Blanc - webdesigner, all members of STIMULI.

With the European project, the initially French research team has been joined by a European consortium of researchers in science education:

  • UNIVERSITE PARIS CITE, France
  • UNIVERSITY OF TOULOUSE II - JEAN JAURES, France
  • UNIVERSITAET LEIPZIG, Germany
  • UNIVERSIDADE DE LISBOA, Portugal
  • INSTITUTO POLITECNICO DE LISBOA, Portugal
  • IESF-INSTITUTO DE ESTUDOS SUPERIORES DE FAFE, LDA, Portugal
  • UNIVERSITAT AUTONOMA BARCELONA, Spain
  • ZESPOL SZKOL URSZULANSKICH w POZNANIU, Poland
  • FCIENCIAS.ID - ASSOCIACAO PARA A INVESTIGACAO E DESENVOLVIMENTO, Portugal
  • OCE, FONDATION POUR L'EDUCATION A LA SCIENCE DANS LE SILLAGE DE LA MAIN A LA PATE, France

The objectives

With "Supertroupers", teachers can get involved in the use of comics in their teaching, from the design of the stories to the adapted teaching scenarios, including the choice of visual representations of scientific content.

Reading an episode of a webcomic helps to bring out the students' initial conceptions and stimulate debate in class. By identifying with the characters in the series, the students are invited to question their own ideas about scientific discoveries, and to take part in discussions about the controversies and concepts associated with each episode. The graphic story serves here as a catalyst for setting up learning sequences experimented with by the research team, as well as a common thread for sequences that teachers would like to develop.

Research on the project

Articles and communications on the series:

Valentin Maron, Laurence Bordenave and Barbara Govin, « Les Grandiloquents » : co-construction d’une bande dessinée numérique pour la classe. Seconde expérimentation de l’épisode sur la gravitation. International conference, Telling Science, Drawing Sciences, June 2022, Angoulême, France.

Valentin Maron, Laurence Bordenave and Barbara Govin, « Co-construction et expérimentation d’une bande dessinée numérique pour la classe : les Grandiloquents, épisode sur la gravitation  », Tréma [En ligne], 51 | 2019, mis en ligne le 01 avril 2019, consulté le 28 août 2023. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/trema/5215 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/trema.5215

Laurence Bordenave, Patricia Crépin-Obert and Maud Pelé, "Conception et analyse didactique d’une bande dessinée numérique sur l’histoire des sciences pour le collège : Les Grandiloquents", International conference, Telling Science, Drawing Sciences, November 2016, Angoulême, France.