This is not an ordinary scientific paper. In fact, it is such an outstanding work that I will make my PhD students read it both because of its content and its format.

Regarding content, the paper illustrates work in progress on the use of interactive tools to generate sequential art--also know as comics--for entertainment, learning, and scientific communication. Rowland et al. present two cases: one by students in a primary school who use sequential art to illustrate a scientific experiment, and the other by older participants who select pictures from a DVD to create a photo-story representative of a biological experiment in which they were the subjects (an instrumented ride in a roller coaster used to collect biological signals significative of facial expressions).

The introduction and description of the first experiment are very interesting. The goal of the second experiment was to lay the groundwork for a future attempt to develop an automated tool to link the recorded data with the emotions felt by the participants. The authors confront the outcome of the experiment with the initial prospects of the teachers, which were, as expected, lower than the final outcome. The second experiment raises another type of issue, related to the lack of interest of older participants when pursuing a research activity. Rowland et al. report that despite the fact that the activity was only considered complete after returning the final questionnaire, only three participants returned that form.

Issues of motivation and education are key to the development of skilled professionals, and thus key to the development of new economies. The authors successfully demonstrate that new approaches such as the sequential art narrative are not only effective at the motivational level, but can also train students to create meaningful representations of concepts of nature by using abstraction and generalization, from reality to meaning.

Regarding the format, the paper itself is sequential art (with the exception of the abstract, initial introduction, acknowledgment, and references). It makes me wish that I could have written the review in the same way.