E$$ENTIAL MEDICINE$ in Schools

[GFirmer]

The E$$ENTIAL MEDICINE$ Project

The idea for a Citizen Science project which collects data on the accessibility and availability of medicines to people worldwide came to @alintheopen, Yaela Golumbic & @kym834 in early 2020. For a number of years, our team had been running the Breaking Good project, where we collaborated with school and undergraduate students to find new, cheap synthetic routes for the WHO's Essential Medicines list as well as synthesising new medicines for under-researched diseases such as malaria and mycetoma. But the need to gather more information about the accessibility of medicines coincided with the necessity of pivoting to an online program during the 2020 outbreak of COVID-19 in Sydney, and the E$$ENTIAL MEDICINE$ project was born. Through three targeted challenges - News Flash, Price Hikes, and the Circle of Life - anyone from the public can contribute to our understanding of social, political, geographic, economic and cultural reasons these medicines might not be available to everyone.
 
In late 2020, we realised that these socio-scientific issues surrounding the development and supply of medicines could be of interest to school-aged students, and that through participation in the program, students could learn important online investigation and science communication skills. So we initiated the design of our first E$$ENTIAL MEDICINE$ in Schools Workshop. In this blog, I am going to share some of our key achievements around the engagement of schools in our Citizen Science Project.

[GFirmer]

Our first workshop - November 2020

We successfully ran our first online workshop with year 9 and 10 students from three schools in November 2020. You can read @kym834 's article about it here

[GFirmer]

April workshops

In April 2021 we ran three modified E$$ENTIAL MEDICINE$ workshops for the University's Experience Sydney and Future Fridays programs. We focussed on helping students to understand that there is a myriad of reasons that all medicines might not be accessible to all people.
 
We started by discussing the COVID-19 vaccine and used Yaela's expertise to highlight all the non-scientific reasons people or governments might use to make decisions about scientific issues. Students considered religious, cultural, geographic, political, economic, safety and issues surrounding the available information and how they influence decision making.
 
Students then completed the 'Are We Essential'? Activity where they are give a snippet of information about twelve familiar medicines and asked to make decisions about the importance of those medicines to the world.
 
Finally, they participated in the News Flash Challenge where they provided us with information around the types of information they are exposed to about medicines in their daily lives.
 
These workshops were designed and presented by @kym834, Yaela Golumbic, @GFirmer and Ciara Kenneally and they were a heap of fun! We are looking forward to being able to welcome students back to the university for more of these workshops in the future.

[GFirmer]

Sharing our work globally at Citizen Science Virtual 2021 - May 2021

In May we shared the progress of this project internationally. It was a great opportunity to meet with other teams working on citizen science, and in particular, we had some valuable conversations with other Australian teams about how citizen science can fit into a school environment.

[GFirmer]

June 2021 - An in-person school workshop

In June this year, we were lucky enough to be able to run an in-person workshop for some enthusiastic year 10 students at Barker College. I'm going to use this post to reflect on some of the things we did differently in this particular workshop.
 
Session 1 - Introduction to E$$ENTIAL MEDICINE$ and can teenagers handle complex molecular structures?
 
Students started the day learning about the WHO's essential medicines list, and the chemistry and biology behind medicines such as aspirin, artemisinin and penicillin. From there, we upped the anti from our normal workshop to see if students would be interested in learning about the structure of medicines in more detail. We started with a 3D model of aspirin they could interact with online, then asked the students to draw the structure in 2D in two different ways. Next, using molecular modelling kits, they made 3D structures of aspirin and compared it to the structure of salicylic acid. We used this example to talk them through the different types of scientific representations of structure - skeletal, condensed, extended structures. This meant that we were able to show students images of how the structures of medicines have been changed by chemists over time to improve their function and reduce unwanted side effects. We knew that introducing complex structures could be a risk - but the feedback from the students about the task was overwhelmingly positive. We even saw models of histamine and artemesinin being made later on in the workshop!
 
Session 2 - Participating in the Circle of Life Challenge
 
In the next part of the day, students conducted an online investigation to learn more about the Circle of Life of one medicine of their choosing. It was a great opportunity for us to watch and interact with the students while they conducted the research - we were able to help them if they had difficulties, and push them to find more if they finished early. Many of them enjoyed learning about the controversies pharmaceutical companies have been involved with over time, and they were interested to see the mix of scientific and economic priorities pursued by the companies. This in-person activity was really valuable for our team, because it allowed us to form a better idea about how students interacted with the task and resources we provided them.
 
Session 3 - Science Communication
 
In our final session, students creatively communicated their findings back to the group. We were mean and told them they couldn't use a powerpoint presentation - and were rewarded with higher levels of creativity in the communication task, than we had received in previous workshops. They were all fantastic, but the stand-outs included an in-depth interview of personified betadine, and a Backstreet Boys cover about Bayer.
 
You can see some photos in Barker College's twitter post about the day here
 
Thank you to the wonderful teachers who helped to organise the day.