Northeastern Professor Uses Comics to Teach Chemical Engineering Concepts
Lucas Landherr’s students already knew who he was before he gave his first lecture. Prior to becoming a chemical engineering professor at Northeastern University in 2012, Landherr started the daily webcomic “Surviving the World” under the pseudonym Dr. Dante Shepherd in 2008.
“I was looking for a creative outlet while I was stuck in grad school,” said Landherr. “I knew that I wanted to teach someday, and really just had to make it through two more years of grad school and two years postdoctoral work. So it gave me something to focus on, a mental relief in a lot of ways, [it] allowed me to focus on other things beside science.”
At its peak, “Surviving the World” attracted tens of thousands of readers every day who came to learn from Dr. Dante Shepherd. Each comic consists of a photo of Landherr in a lab coat with the day’s lesson, which touches all aspects of life, from words of wisdom to pop culture.
Out of the more than 3500 comics Landherr created for “Surviving the World,” one that particularly stands out to him is “Lesson #628 — Happiness,” which portrays a maze with a straight path to happiness. He wanted to emphasize the idea that “there’s a bunch of ways to happiness, different approaches. That was one that a lot of people appreciated and kind of stuck around with for awhile,” Landherr said.
He ended “Surviving the World” on June 1, a decade and a day after he published the first comic.
“I was trying to pretend to be a professor with a chalkboard, and now I am one. But I was trying to find different ways to combine humor into education,” said Landherr.
Now, the professor is focusing on creating comics to teach science and engineering concepts. One of the first classes Landherr taught in thermodynamics includes a central concept called “fugacity.” He calls it “kind of a running joke” that no one really understands what fugacity is.
“It’s this term that we can calculate, but it really kind of sits within a series of calculations. It’s kind of this midpoint, but it’s never the starting point, it’s never the finishing point,” said Landherr. “It’s just something that we need to pass through to get to our goal.”
He wanted to create a visual description of the complex concept to help students gain more confidence and understanding in the subject matter. His comics essentially recreate the classroom experience in still, visual form.
“The student in the comic could ask some of the same questions that we heard students in the classrooms ask all the time. Because it’s a comic, you’re not stuck within the classroom depiction,” Landherr explained. “You can put in equations and things like that, but it can be broken down into pieces, or you can highlight it visually and try to attack it from a different approach.”
In small surveys Landherr has done, he’s found that most students generally feel that visual over verbal learning works better for them. Even in engineering, where the material focuses heavily on math and verbal lectures, his students still want a visual aspect. He sees the comics as visual supplements to revisit the classroom experience rather than replacing lectures, though he noted he is still working on assessing how effective the comics are.
In addition, he’s branching out and trying to collaborate with other universities that can more effectively assess how comics can play a role in learning. Landherr puts all his educational comics up for free online, and he’s heard from other universities, high schools, and people working in industry about how they are being used — including a lawyer for a deposition. Beside the chemical engineering focused ones, he and his students have also made comics on more general topics, such as uncertainty and data analysis. This past semester, he worked with around six undergraduate students in STEM majors who were drawing or writing comics.
“There’s a lot of people with diverse skills and wanting to use the artistic side of their brains just as much as they use the scientific side,” said Landherr.
Every quarter, he also contributes a two-page comic about teaching to the peer-reviewed journal Chemical Engineering Education. Some of those comics have been drawn by students, and others by professional artists he collaborates with.
Landherr noted that comics are becoming a major education tool within science and engineering, particularly for the K-12 level. However, he still feels some stigma around comics, such as when he has presented at conferences.
“I think that a lot of people still view them as kind of childish, and we’re still trying to overcome that perception,” he said. “But I think that once people see there’s potential benefit in the way that students are responding to these — not all students are going to respond to them, but certainly some of them are — I think there’s a real benefit to improving overall education.”
