AL, Logical

 The mathy graphic novel I wrote with my high school art teacher son Xavier is up on Kickstarter!

The Kickstarter has a lot of information about the story, so I'll geek out here a bit more.

We started with the protagonist: a middle school student who knew she wasn't a math person. The haunted house idea came along pretty early. And a pretty cosmic haunted house with some Cthulu near relatives peeking in.

One of the frameworks we built the story around are the Van Hiele levels of geometric reasoning. This let AL develop and tackle more complex problems as the story progresses.

Though AL does more than geometry as she's tackling problems from all different kinds of math.

A lot of math comics are directly trying to teach some specific content. This comic is about trying to show the experience of doing math. The framework that helped the most for this is from Tracy Johnston Zager's Becoming the Math Teacher You Wish You'd Had. These chapters...

3: Mathematicians Take Risks

4: Mathematicians Make Mistakes

5: Mathematicians are Precise

6: Mathematicians Rise To A Challenge

7: Mathematicians Ask Questions

8: Mathematicians Connect Ideas

9: Mathematicians Use Intuition

10: Mathematicians Reason

11: Mathematicians Prove

12: Mathematicians Work Together and Alone

... really give you a great feel for what doing math is.

All this might make it sound dry, but the focus was on the story. Very inspired by stories like The Phantom Tollbooth, and our love for comic books, we were glad to see that the beta readers found it fun.

More about the story and other mathy comics in the AL, Logical tab, and of course at the Kickstarter!