A Fully Immersive Mobile App Is Now Being Used Across The Country To Better Educate Students About Viral Infection Spread
Prior to COVID-19, habits such as shaking hands, sharing a drink, using public restrooms, blowing out the candles on your birthday cake, and attending highly populated events like concerts or festivals were all widely commonplace.
Now, though, people have looked back on pre-pandemic practices with disgust after realizing just how quickly germs can spread from people and objects.
Yet, in 2016, a middle school teacher from Florida named Todd Brown and a computational geneticist at the Broad Institute of MIT, Pardis Sabeti, already recognized just how quickly outbreaks– and ultimate pandemics– can manifest.
That year, they developed an interactive lesson to teach middle schoolers about infectious diseases.
The students were provided with stickers that, when exchanged, simulated the rapid spread of viral infection.
And since then, the low-budget lesson has evolved into an entirely immersive experience known as Operation Outbreak.
Operation Outbreak utilizes a Bluetooth-based mobile application in order to simulate the spread of pathogens across participants’ phones.
Now, over fifty schools nationwide have begun using this app as a lesson plan supplement to inform students about the reality of pandemics.
“Simulation games can be highly immersive, interactive, and realistic, as well as able to generate rich datasets to study complex dynamical systems– such as a population during an infectious disease outbreak,” the app’s developer, Andrés Colubri, explained.
zigres – stock.adobe.com – illustrative purpose only, not the actual person
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The app has now evolved to mimic reality through the addition of countless features, including QR codes that simulate interventions such as masks, hazmat suits, diagnostic tests, and vaccines. Plus, it records pertinent data– such as the distance, duration, and time of interactions between students– to be used for virus spread mapping.
And most recently, the research team published a study in Patterns that analyzed the results of Operation Outbreak simulations after being implemented at Brigham and Young University (BYU) and Colorado Mesa University (CMU).
They found that college students were able to gain a much deeper understanding of viral spreads since the app was found to be easy to use, educational, and provided a hands-on element that cannot be replicated in a lecture. Moreover, the Operation Outbreak data collected by the app really motivated students to take proactive steps toward outbreak prevention.
“At BYU, it was inspiring to see the extent to which this simulation encouraged students to get involved with outbreak science projects,” began Ivan Specht, the study’s first author.
“Students formed an Operation Outbreak club and set up a website to help facilitate the simulation. After we collected data from the simulation, some of the people on that team helped us with some of the analyses, and I was very excited to see how eager they were to participate in this way of learning.”
Now, the researchers are hoping to use the CMU and BYU students’ feedback to make appropriate app changes before working on launching Operation Outbreak in more schools across the nation.
“We envision a world where Operation Outbreak is deployed at least once in every school because we think that children everywhere should get access to at least some level of outbreak science education,” Specht underscored.
To learn more about Operation Outbreak and read the study’s complete findings, visit the link here.
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