Artist, Laura Sorvala, and our education director, Edward Gomez, have created a series of comic books exploring space, being a scientist and robotic telescopes.
They follow Ada Jenkins, a girl who loves asking questions, from junior school, high school and finally at university.
Aims
We created the comic to inspire and empower children to do science, no matter what their background or circumstances are. The most fundamental part of being a good scientist is asking questions, and children are excellent at asking questions.Accessibility
As well as empowerment, there is an accessibility theme running through all 3 stories in these comic books. Ada is black and female, she lives in a terraced or row house in the Welsh valleys, a predominantly working class area. Ada has friends from all different backgrounds and heritages throughout her adventures, including a non-binary character. The comics are drawn in black and white so they can be easily (and inexpensively) copied and distributed in classrooms (and colored in by children too). There is a creative commons licence on the comics so they can be freely shared
Languages
Part of making Ada's adventures accessible is providing them in different languages. When we launched the comics in 2018, we had comics available in English, Welsh, Spanish and German. Since then the community has generously provided translations into another 14 languages. You can find all the language versions of Ada on the comic book website.
Ada's Adventures website >
Discoveries only happen by working together!
Robotic Telescopes: How to find cool stuff in space
There is no such thing as a stupid question
The comic books are also available in multiple different languages on the Ada's Adventures website.
The order of the pages in the "print version" will allow you to print as an A5 booklet. Just print this out on A4 paper, double sided (with "Short-edge binding" option).
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
We would like to thank Welsh Government, the Royal Astronomical Society, and Las Cumbres Observatory for their financial support in creating these comic books.