The Watermelon Meow Meow Outbreak: Enhancing Public Health Education Through Real-World Experience, Statistical Programming, and Infectious Disease Modeling (original) (raw)

PRIMUS, 2024

Abstract

There is a need for public health students to acquire skills in data collection, statistical programming, and modeling of infectious diseases. Public health officials and accreditation bodies underline the importance of a cumulative, ”real-world” experience as part of student education. The Watermelon Meow Meow (WMM)outbreak is an in-class cumulative experience that teaches students about how an infectious agent propagates through a population by asking students to simulate a fictitious outbreak, collect and analyze outbreak data.Innovative to our approach is the use of DataCamp as a tool to support learning statistical programming and framing WMM under the principles of Universal Design Learning (UDL). We evaluated 27/32 student responses using a mixed-methods approach. We found WMM: augmented traditional lecture-style instruction and increased student awareness of heterogeneous risks associated with infectious diseases. We identified three student typologies: students who learn best from (i) integrating traditional lecture plus WMM, (ii)participating in WMM data collection but not coding, and (iii) from lecture and classroom-based learning from peers. WMM is an example for instructors of a more general approach—which we call Slate, Operate,Translate—that instructors can follow to satisfy UDL principles and increasing demands of public health education in a mathematics/statistics class.

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