A pedagogical student in Ho Chi Minh City has found a special way to become an interesting teacher who attracts learners by changing his lessons into cartoons.

Nguyen The Nhat, a student from the geography faculty of the Ho Chi Minh City University of Education, won the first prize in the school’s science research contest this year for his project on using his self-designed cartoons to teach geography.

Recently, Nhat has adapted a lesson on the world and Viet Nam’s population development and issues into a cartoon and piloted it to teach in a 10th grade class of the Practice High School under the university.

Nhat’s idea has received positive responses from the students who kept asking him to show them how he made the films related to their lessons.

Nguyen The Nhat, a student from the Ho Chi Minh City University of Education’s geography faculty (Photo: Tuoi Tre)

To get students interested

The idea of teaching through cartoons occurred to Nhat when he was an intern before graduating and becoming a teacher.

“Many teachers still use old methods which only have one way to provide knowledge for students,” Nhat commented, saying students have not paid attention to science subjects.

“Even teachers do not feel excited to teach so they hardly think about adjusting their teaching methodology, leading to indifference from students,” Nhat added.

Encouraged by the question of how to make students interested in these subjects, Nguyen The Nhat found cartoons to be his way out.

He said animation is one of the tools used to increase the diversity and richness of visual aids in teaching geography.

Nhat started by cherry-picking suitable content from textbooks to adapt it into cartoons, then writing a screenplay and preparing subtitles or voice-overs for the films.

According to Nhat, creating movies from screenplays was the toughest part since he is just an amateur in the field.

To make his movies, Nhat used characters and settings on the site goatanimate.com, which allows users to make animated works from available characters and settings, and then designed them the way he wanted his stories to be.

“After finishing the screenplays, I learned to design and edit movies on the Internet,” Nhat recalled. “The process was not easy because I didn’t have specific equipment, especially for dubbing.”

“The quality of sound in my movies is not very good, with many noises,” he admitted. “It reduces the film quality.”

Class and cinema

So far, Nhat has created five animated movies and used two of them to teach geography to 52 10th grade students in two classes.

Nhat said by using this method, teachers can easily show students movies and ask them to do exercises included in the films.

“With this way of studying, cartoons can be considered a vivid source of knowledge for students, drawing their attention to the lesson and preventing them from feeling bored in class,” Nhat explained.

After the pilot classes, 82.7 percent expressed their interest in the class-cum-cinema model and more than 80 percent said they stayed focused and contributed to the class.

“This is an interesting and absolutely applicable project,” Ha Van Thang, an instructor from the Ho Chi Minh City University of Education’s geography faculty, said. “The cartoons do not only inspire students to study but also deliver geographic content easily and scientifically.”

Thang said the university and its instructors will join hands to help Nhat to complete the project and bring it to bigger competitions so that more people will know about it.

Besides, the school will also introduce Nhat’s method to its geography students and high school teachers.

(Source: Tuoi Tre News)