The Effect of Comic Strips as a Supplementary Material to Teach Computer Networks

The existing method of teaching computer networks has several shortcomings -- uninteresting, difficulty in understanding and relating, paucity of time to impart complete knowledge and low interaction levels between students. During the third year Computer Engineering students are introduced to the intricacies of Computer Networks e.g. TCP/IP suite. The students perceive the technical details and jargons to be complex. This perception hinders the learning process. The idea of this paper is to use comic strips, prepared in alignment with the course objective, as a supplementary course material, to facilitate recall of concepts in Computer Networks. The Comic strips gives life to the abstract nature of theoretical concepts. Thus, by the addition of comic book as a supplementary element, we add fun element to the teaching-learning process. This brings in greater involvement of students. During the course of the experiment we observed that: (i) the recall rates of students exposed to comic strips has been better or comparable to the students taught using existing methodology, (ii) the comic strip as a supplement adds fun element to the teaching-learning process.