Here is my story:
My rationale for telling this story is two-fold. First, this is a story that I tell every year to my physics 11 class. It is a really valuable way to introduce the topic of two dimensional vectors. It gets the students to put themselves in a real life situation where they can really picture independent two dimensional vectors at work. Every time I tell this story I get the students to answer the question “why did they miss?” and usually every student gets it right. This always impresses me because this is one of the toughest topics that they face all year but they still get it right away.
The second reason is a little less curricular. I like to tell this story because it is a (mostly true) account from my childhood and it is a great way to be more personal.
I decided to use bitstrips for a number of reasons. First, the interface really impressed me. It was very easy to use right away. Second, I will be using this comic to tell my story to my online students and I think that this really conveys the intended message. In particular I wanted to use drawings to show the different velocity vectors at work (the car and the balloon). Lastly, now that I’ve built my characters on bitstrips it will be really easy to make more comics to relate other stories I have.
The main limit that I ran into using bitstrips was the artwork/props that they had available for story telling. With a little creative use of some of the props that were made available it was able to work it out. I did find bitstrips for schools which allows access to flickr photos which means the possibilities could be almost endless…