They Picked Their Nose
I ask the lecture theatre full of medical students how the patient got S. aureus in their wound, “they picked their nose and then rubbed their finger in the wound” is the reply, to nervous laughter from the other students. The GermBug story about Alan aureus has just worked. While it seems simple, to teach students that picking your nose can transmit S.aurues, somehow the lecture given 30 minutes earlier, didn’t teach them this. Teaching microbiology can be hard.
Micro Made Easy
It is always hard to remember what we didn’t know, to remember how hard it was to “get” concepts around infection. But I do remember teaching Liverpool medical students in 2010 some medical microbiology. I was asked if I could “make micro easier”. So I have always been on the look out for an answer to that medical student, and later ones, who asked if there was a way to make all this Latin and Greek a bit less off putting, if there was a way to avoid more lists. The idea didn’t arrive until I started regularly reading children’s books. At some point the request for micro made easy bumped into these children’s stories and they merged, coming out the other side as the teaching resource of the GermBug Stories.
Obvious After The Event
I can see it now, but medical microbiology is really well suited to being taught by stories. We all personify our common bacterial adversaries, making them nasty, or sticky or slimy. And the infectious process is nothing if not a sequence of sequential events that can easily be put into story format. GermBugs offers the chance to teach clinically relevant medical microbiology by basing education around stories of infection. Stories are how we have as humans traditionally learned, and hijacking this process for our educational agenda makes everyone’s life easier.
“Its’ easy, you just remember what you have seen”
GermBugs is a set of stories about the top 10 bacterial pathogens in medical microbiology. The Stories follow bacterial characters, as they cause infection. There are two versions of the stories. One that includes only the story. We always suggest students start with this. And then there is a version with science embedded into the stories via interactive buttons. Students often need support with new resources, and so we have also developed a workbook to take them through the teaching resource, point out important content, and test their knowledge. We get some nice feedback from students who have used the resource. Some quotes are “its’ easy, you just remember what you have seen”, “a fun way of learning something boring”, “very memorable and innovative”, “Love this, as someone with dyslexia it was so refreshing… it really changed the way I’ll learn in future.” “I remembered all of it. So much easier. Incredible idea. Really does work”.
Patronising
Despite the nice comments we get, it was tough to start with. At the beginning we made a few stories, and showed them to the students. Initially, we got pushback. Students felt very patronised. They are serious medical students here to do serious work. We needed a new teaching approach. That approach came from a medical student doing a masters project on GermBugs. She suggested giving the students a traditional lecture first, followed by a few testing questions. And second, the GermBugs resource was given to the students, again followed by a few clinical questions. This meant they could in real time compare the differences between the two resources. When I gave a lecture using this approach, traditional lecture on S.aurues first followed by Alan aureus GermBugs story, I really noticed a difference in the student’s attention. During a pre-recorded traditional lecture on S. aurues, the students were their usual fidgety selves, but when the GermBugs came on, silence descended, and the fidgeting stopped. I had their attention; I was not overwhelming them and they could maintain their concentration. Afterwards for the first time I had a student come up to me and tell me “that was the best lecture of the year, we normally just get lists”
Job Done
To round off making medical microbiology easy to learn we made interactive coloured charts which show which antibiotics kill which bacteria. And finally, we made a quiz to let the students test themselves. With all of that, I’m hoping that is job done, Micro Made Easy at last.
Photos: Taken for the GermBugs website and we have copyright:
https://onlinecourses.leeds.ac.uk/germbugs/revisiontool/index.html
https://time.leeds.ac.uk/resources/germ-bugs/