Visualisation and Interactive Simulation for Education and Public Engagement

The project

Data visualisations and interactive computational simulations offer new opportunities for engaging with and understanding complex processes, such as the spread of a disease and the impact of public health interventions that happen rapidly and at a large population scale, as well as slow processes such as the erosion of coastline due to climate change.

Here we report on a project that we carried out during the COVID-19 pandemic where we developed a method involving data visualisations and interactive simulations along with physical activities to support school age children in learning about how infectious diseases spread, how public health interventions such as vaccinations or isolation policies impact the disease spread as well as how computational models work in this context.

We joined forces with an educational partner in the UK called TechnocampsLink opens in a new window to design visualization tools and an associated workshop on the computational modeling of diseases. We delivered a first version of the activity at Swansea Science Museum to a small group of children and parents first. Technocamps facilitators then ran several iterations of the workshop at several schools in Wales and England and the workshop reached over 1200 school children.

Within the workshops, children first listened to a presentation on how diseases spread and how probability helps to understand some of the dynamics. They then take part in a physical activity involving rolling a dice and throwing a string to peers to experience disease spread in a playful way. The workshops then switched to a "digital" activity where children interact with our interactive simulation and data visualisation tool, Particle People, to experiment how a disease spreads in a small, simulated town. They were able to play with the parameters of the simulation, introduce public health interventions, such as isolation in place and vaccination, to curb the spread of the disease. They also had the option to create different scenarios involving a range of viruses with distinct capacities and dynamics to spread (eg., by setting the infamous R-value). Once they interact with the tool, they then switch to a closing presentation to get them reflect on what they have observed.

The method enables interaction across physical (e.g., the string) and digital mediums (e.g., the online simulator) and generates synergies between them by using shared/similar metaphors to explore a complex concept -- in this case how diseases spread and how public health interventions impact that. While physical activities do work great as "hooks" and to raise interest, the sophisticated simulation and visualisation tools make complex processes much more visible and tractable, by, for instance, speeding up time, scaling up patterns to hundreds or thousands of agents -- opening up new possibilities to engage and educate broad audience on processes that are complex and hard to "visualize" without digital prompts.

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