IT Ethics - Welcome to ComicBEE!

Some things to think about -

  1. You are trying to illustrate different perspectives in an ethical dilemma
  2. The decision points do not necessarily reflect a purely good or bad choice
  3. The audience for your branching story/comic is college students like yourself
  4. What is the dilemma, who are the stakeholders, what are the scenarios?
  5. What frameworks are involved?
  6. What facts are presented in order for the user to be able to make a decision at each stage of the story?

Go here to see examples of branching stories about ethics developed with ComicBEE
https://www3.cs.stonybrook.edu/~tony/itethics/comics_and_ethics.html

Here's the process:
Lesson Plan > Script Writing > Storyboard > Final Comic


First Stage - Establish a Project to create a Lesson Plan

Create an account for yourself at thia address  https://www2.comic-bee.com/Account/SelfRegister/1ffdf29f-bab2-4fc1-830e-c6d0d17d618b

Use your SBU Gmail address for email verification

Then go to the ComicBEE website - https://comic-bee.com (USE THE CHROME BROWSER!)

Select Login

Download the ComicBEE User Guide - https://comic-bee.com/Docs/Comic-BEE_UserGuide.pdf

Or view the video tutorials at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6qqX87Rocs&list=PLZ3cs-WMaGOztWSXRxxxU5c6zu0ZF07Vp

Give your project a name, and click Create

Your project will appear in the project list, choose Open

Topic is the Campus Ethical dilemma you chose

Audience is college freshmen

Now select Real life scenarios

Click New Real Life Scenario to add a new scenario

  1. Establish the starting scene
  2. Create at least 4 decision points
  3. Create final scene(s)

Then go to Learning objectives

  1. Create a concept behind each decision point (what framework are you exploring?)
  2. Ignore KSA’s, and specific learning objectives associated with them
  3. Save as you go (blue button top of page)

Export Lesson Plan

The downloaded Word doc will be an addendum to your final project, uploaded to Blackboard


Second Stage - Create a Branching Story/Comic!

1. Select Plan Lesson > Write Script (very top left of application)

Add Title & Characters for your comic

Twirl scenarios down to show the ones you created (arrow button in upper right corner)

You can drag scenarios down to the work area to create relationships between them

Select the scenario you want to be the start scene

Its node appears below, select arrow on right of node and choose edit

Create a question related to the decision to move on to the next scene

Select “new choice” to create an answer to the question. Select it again to create alternative choices for the reader to make
You may ignore the scoring options for story choices

Drag a connector from each decision point to the scene that follows it (box in the middle at the bottom of each node)

Save the file

2. Select the drop-down menu in the top, upper left (showing Plan Lesson or Write Script) and choose Layout storyboard

All scenes are listed in the drop-down menu at the top left

Choose a layout for each scene (single frame, multiple frame, etc.)

Select Start Storyboarding

Advice: use the text tool to write notes about the content of the frame for each scenario, but ignore the graphics at this point

Select Mark panel as done

Click on Preview to get a sense of how the story will flow. You can go back to Write Script if you need to add a scene or modify choices so that the story makes sense

Remember to Save!

3. Select Plan Lesson > Create final comic

Choose your scenes from the drop-down menu in the upper left

You can use the ComicBEE library of props and characters, or you can upload .svg graphics files
Note that ComicBEE will not accept svg images that are too large, or contain too many colors

Here are some free sources for .svg illustrations:

https://undraw.co/illustrations

https://iradesign.io

https://www.drawkit.io/free

https://www.manypixels.co/gallery/

Advice: If you want to create your own graphics, Inkscape is free, easy to use, and cross-platform! You may need it to edit the graphics you have downloaded.
https://inkscape.org/

Tip: use a consistent style of images for a better more cohesive look

See Final Comic Help for tips on how to copy whole panels, change character positions and expressions, etc.

Save as you go

You can preview your comic as you develop it

Publish to your local computer as .zip file