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Abstract

There is a need for public health undergraduates to acquire skills in data collection, statistical programming, and infectious diseases modeling. Public health officials and accreditation bodies underline the importance of a cumulative, “real-world” experience as part of a student’s education. The Watermelon Meow Meow (WMM) outbreak is a cumulative experience that teaches upper-level undergraduate/graduate students about infectious disease dynamics by asking students to: participate in a fictitious outbreak; collect and analyze outbreak data. Innovative to our approach is the use of DataCamp as a technology to support learning statistical programming and framing WMM under 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 of a more general approach – which we call Slate, Operate, Translate – that instructors can follow to combine technology and a hands-on experiment to satisfy both UDL principles and increasing demands of public health education in a mathematics/statistics class.


Citation

McAndrew, Thomas, Rochelle L. Frounfelker, and Lorenzo Servitje. “The Watermelon Meow Meow Outbreak: Enhancing Public Health Education Through Real-World Experience, Statistical Programming, and Infectious Disease Modeling.” PRIMUS 34.4 (2024): 351-375.

BibTeX
@article{mcandrew2024watermelon,
  title={The Watermelon Meow Meow Outbreak: Enhancing Public Health Education Through Real-World Experience, Statistical Programming, and Infectious Disease Modeling},
  author={McAndrew, Thomas and Frounfelker, Rochelle L and Servitje, Lorenzo},
  journal={PRIMUS},
  volume={34},
  number={4},
  pages={351--375},
  year={2024},
  publisher={Taylor \& Francis}
}