Translator: Viviane P. Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
I'm here to show you how a graphic novel on Nikola Tesla
can change the way we approach education today.
Right now, we have 42 million adults that can't read past fifth grade,
we have a million kids a year that are dropping out of school,
and we have one out of every four children today
that are going to grow up not knowing how to read.
And on top of that, we also have a serious STEM deficiency.
We're now ranked 25th in math and 17th in science,
yet we're going to produce 1.2 million STEM-related jobs
but only fulfill a third of them in the next 10 years.
So, what's going on with our education system
that's allowing this to happen?
Well, I believe our fundamental problem is that we're not engaging our kids.
In fact, I think we're using a 20th-century teaching approach
in a 21st-century classroom.
And it's not working; well, it can't work.
Here's why.
In the 21st century,
we're rapidly evolving into what I call hyper-visual culture.
In fact, right now we're sharing over 500 million pictures a day,
and that's going to double every year.
And, probably most of you are on Facebook,
but kids today are growing up with apps like Snapchat and Instagram,
where all they see are pictures
with a caption of a few little words underneath them.
But these pictures speak a thousand words to these kids.
It tells them a story.
And then they'll scroll through 10 of these pictures in less than a minute
and essentially just digested 10,000 words worth of information
in that short amount of time.
However, when they go to school, we hand them a textbook,
and they open this book up and they see a lot of words but not a lot of imagery,
and we lose them.
Reading is too slow for them; it's too inefficient.
These kids today are hyper-visual learners.
So, what if we took a visual-learning approach to these kids?
What would that look like?
How would that work?
Aha, well, I'm going to show you.
When I was a kid, I loved reading comics.
There's something about the visual art and storytelling brought together
that would just pull me in.
It made me feel like I was reading a movie.
And then, reading about our superheroes, like Superman,
just made me believe anything was possible;
it set my imagination on fire.
But when I was eight years old, I moved to India,
and the comic culture there is a little bit different.
They had two main lines of comics.
One was around our Indian mythology;
so, it was stories about our Hindu gods and goddesses and what they did.
So instead of Superman, I was reading about Shiva.
But the other is around our history
and the kings and queens that ruled India over thousands of years
and even modern leaders like Mahatma Gandhi
and how he inspired an entire revolution through nonviolence,
which to this day still blows me away.
I loved reading these stories!
They were so immersive, they were so interesting,
that one summer I read over 100 comics
and learned so much about our history and culture
in such a short amount of time.
So, I recognize that our Western mythology has been covered by our superheroes,
but what about our history?
What about our real-world heroes,
the people that actually made a difference in our lives?
So, being an engineer and a techie myself, I thought,
"Why don't I start a science-inspired line of non-fiction graphic novels
around engineers, scientists, and inventors
that use the power of their mind and imagination
to create things that help change our world?
I'll call it The Inventor Series,
and I'll start with Nikola Tesla as my first inventor."
Well, I had three major hurdles I was up against.
One, I'd never written a graphic novel before,
nor was I from the comic industry,
so I had no idea where to begin.
Two, there's no real action in the story like we see in comics today.
There's no violence, blood, gore, sex, profanity,
so what's going to keep people's attention?
And three,
[NO ZOMBIES] there are really no zombies.
(Laughter)
So, the real question was,
How could I make a story about a bunch of engineers interesting ...
without zombies?
So, we started with the character design.
I worked with my artist Erik Williams to reimagine these characters
and make it more edgy, make it more interesting and relevant to us today.
So we gave Tesla more of a steampunk rock band/mad scientist look
to make him more edgy, just like his ideas were.
But then we gave Edison more of a Japanese anime flair
with a rigid facial structure to reflect his personality in the story.
We also used an environment
to really reflect the emotions of these characters in the story.
So, here you can tell that Tesla, in this case, is completely defeated,
yet here, he looks completely in awe with what he just discovered and created.
So I thought,
"Well, maybe with my writing style and our cinematic approach to our art,
just maybe we could keep someone's attention."
Well, in 2012 we decided to release our graphic novel
at the San Diego Comic-Con,
and to our surprise, it ended up being one of the top-selling graphic novels
for our comic publisher, Arcana.
Since then, we've sold over 30,000 copies,
we're now the number one non-fiction graphic novel on the market,
and our publishing partner, Scholastic,
is now distributing it through all their Scholastic book fairs,
which has a reach of over 35 million kids.
And -
(Applause)
Thank you.
And Apple even featured it
on the very front page of their iBooks section,
next to Star Wars, Watchmen, and Superman,
three of the biggest fictional properties on the planet.
In fact, they also featured an electronic dance album I produced around the story,
which, we just found out,
was just now pre-nominated for the Grammys in four categories.
(Applause)
Thank you.
But what got me most excited
was when schoolteachers started buying the book for their classroom
because that's why I originally did this;
my intention was to connect with kids so they could learn
because that's how I learned.
I started visiting classrooms and teachers to see how they're using it,
and it was interesting.
Different teachers used it in different ways.
The history teacher used it to teach the Second Industrial Revolution from,
or the art teacher used it to teach visual narrative,
and then down the hall,
the English teacher used it as a literary source
so their kids could reflect upon the extreme dichotomy
of these two personalities of Tesla and Edison
and how it reflects in our culture today.
But what I saw most consistent across all these classrooms were
all these kids were engaged.
They were interested.
They wanted to learn more.
In fact, they were even having fun.
[IT'S WORKING!]
(Laughter)
So I think I'm onto something here.
So, my mission now is to take what I already started with,
which is this one graphic novel on Nikola Tesla,
and expand it into a series of non-fiction graphic novels on other inventors
so we could engage our kids to read and learn
but also inspire STEM learning.
In fact, we could also introduce real-world role models
that these kids can aspire to be like and even be inspired by
because once these kids are inspired,
they'll research everything they can on a topic.
They don't need us anymore.
They learn way faster on their own and through each other
than if we're in the way.
All that you have to do is just ignite them.
You just have to light their fire.
And if we could light their fire,
then not only can we empower a whole new generation of independent thinkers,
but we can inspire a whole new culture of independent creators
because in the end, those are the ones who change the world.
Thank you.
(Applause)