Original map made my John Snow in tracing the 1854 Cholera outbreak to a water pump. Snow, J. (1855). On the mode of communication of cholera. London: John Churchill. retrieved from https://archive.org/details/b28985266/page/n57/mode/1up
Set up
- Find a location to be the “town”. Ideally, this could be a field or a gym.
- Set up certain areas (10 houses, one river, one well, and one swamp) using resources available to you (for example, hoops to represent houses, chairs, etc). Houses should be labeled with identifiers such as numbers.
- Create maps for the kids detailing the locations of the houses, river, well, and swamp. These maps will be used by the kids to mark which houses have outbreaks. Be sure to include the identifiers on the map so the kids know which house is which.
- Decide which houses will have outbreaks of cholera. These houses should be nearest to the local well
Before the game
- Explain the premise of the game and background information (see pre-game setup).
- Introduce the first questionnaire to assess level of knowledge on disease spread.
During the game
- The kids will be tasked to figure out which of the three locations are responsible for the outbreak (ie, swamp, well, or river). In Jon Snow’s original work, he found the well to be responsible. Furthermore, it was frequently thought that miasma from swamps spread Cholera – this should be an essential point the kids set out to “disprove”.
- Kids will colour in the house locations that have outbreaks. They should come to realize that the well is responsible, as the map will show houses close to the well catching cholera. Once they figure this out, the class should “close off the well” so the town can only get their water from the river.
- Play the game again, however this time with the well closed off. Remove all “outbreak” identifiers in the houses. The kids should come to the conclusion that the well was fully responsible, and by removing the source, they saved the town.
After the game
- Have another discussion, this time solidifying the points on what happened and on how Cholera is spread.
- Have kids answer a post-game questionnaire, with similar questions as before.
References
Snow, J. (1855). On the mode of communication of cholera. London: John Churchill. retrieved from https://archive.org/details/b28985266/page/n57/mode/1up
Sherman, I. (2007). Twelve diseases that changed our world. American Society for Microbiology.