Design and Feasibility Study of the Mobile Application StopTheSpread

The emergence of recent disease outbreaks calls for the design of new educational games aimed at increasing awareness in disease prevention. This article presents StopTheSpread, an educational mobile application that seeks to improve awareness about the best practices to prevent the spreading of seasonal flu in the general public. StopTheSpread integrates concepts in network science and epidemiology, within a freely available mobile application that provides a unique learning experience for free-choice learners about flu prevention. StopTheSpread teaches users basic concepts about flu prevention, within a series of games of increasing difficulty that maintain user engagement and offers a user-friendly design. StopTheSpread provides a summary of the best practices to prevent flu spreading according to the guidelines of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the World Health Organization, while connecting users to citizen science projects aimed at worldwide flu tracking. Through Facebook, Twitter, and email we reached volunteers during the COVID-19 confinement, to conduct an online feasibility study, toward assessing learning outcome in playing with our mobile application. Our results indicate that the use of StopTheSpread increased by 20% the awareness about the spreading mechanism of flu, compared with the baseline population.

[1]  Susan A. Yoon,et al.  Developing games and simulations for today and tomorrow’s tech savvy youth , 2005 .

[2]  Ciro Cattuto,et al.  Dynamics of Person-to-Person Interactions from Distributed RFID Sensor Networks , 2010, PloS one.

[3]  Zhen Wang,et al.  An Extended Exploration to the Epidemic Containment Game , 2018, 2018 27th International Conference on Computer Communication and Networks (ICCCN).

[4]  Kyle Bowen,et al.  Student Preferences for Mobile App Usage , 2012 .

[5]  Mark Newman,et al.  Networks: An Introduction , 2010 .

[6]  Midori Aoyagi-Usui,et al.  Mass-media coverage, its influence on public awareness of climate-change issues, and implications for Japan???s national campaign to reduce greenhouse gas emissions , 2009 .

[7]  R. C. Laugksch.  Scientific literacy: A conceptual overview , 2000 .

[8]  Forrest Shull,et al.  To Game or Not to Game? , 2009, IEEE Software.

[9]  Avi Hofstein,et al.  Bridging the Gap Between Formal and Informal Science Learning , 1996 .

[10]  J. Falk,et al.  The 95 Percent Solution School is not where most Americans learn most of their science , 2010 .

[11]  M. Demir,et al.  Volunteer Bias in Research on Friendship Among Emerging Adults , 2017 .

[12]  Karen Littleton,et al.  Gender and Social Comparison Effects in Computer-Based Problem Solving. , 2000 .

[13]  Albert-László Barabási,et al.  Internet: Diameter of the World-Wide Web , 1999, Nature.

[14]  W. Bartfay,et al.  Promoting Health in Schools through a Board Game , 1994, Western journal of nursing research.

[15]  R. Wiers,et al.  What's in a Trial? On the Importance of Distinguishing Between Experimental Lab Studies and Randomized Controlled Trials: The Case of Cognitive Bias Modification and Alcohol Use Disorders. , 2018, Journal of studies on alcohol and drugs.

[16]  R. Groves,et al.  The Role of Topic Interest in Survey Participation Decisions , 2004 .

[17]  Bin Zhu,et al.  Visualizing social network concepts , 2010, Decis. Support Syst..

[18]  Maria del Carmen Juan Lizandra,et al.  Evaluation of learning outcomes using an educational iPhone game vs. traditional game , 2013, Comput. Educ..

[19]  N. Cliff.  Dominance statistics: Ordinal analyses to answer ordinal questions. , 1993 .

[20]  J. Gee,et al.  How Computer Games Help Children Learn , 2006 .

[21]  M. Porfiri,et al.  simUfish: An Interactive Application to Teach K-12 Students About Zebrafish Behavior. , 2017, Zebrafish.

[22]  H. Hethcote.  A Thousand and One Epidemic Models , 1994 .

[23]  K. L. Cooke,et al.  Analysis of an SEIRS epidemic model with two delays , 1996, Journal of mathematical biology.

[24]  Albert,et al.  Emergence of scaling in random networks , 1999, Science.

[25]  Ullrich K. H. Ecker,et al.  Beyond Misinformation: Understanding and coping with the post-truth era , 2017 .

[26]  Ulrik Brandes,et al.  Explanation Through Network Visualization , 2006 .

[27]  Eva García,et al.  On the effectiveness of game-like and social approaches in learning: Comparing educational gaming, gamification & social networking , 2016, Comput. Educ..

[28]  Andrew Shouse,et al.  Learning science in informal environments : people, places, and pursuits , 2009 .

[29]  Maurizio Porfiri,et al.  Contagion Processes Over Temporal Networks With Time-Varying Backbones , 2019 .

[30]  Joel C. Miller,et al.  Effective vaccination strategies for realistic social networks , 2007 .

[31]  Azita Iliya Abdul Jabbar,et al.  Gameplay Engagement and Learning in Game-Based Learning , 2015 .

[32]  E. Johansson,et al.  What do young adults know about the HIV/AIDS epidemic? Findings from a population based study in Karachi, Pakistan , 2009, BMC infectious diseases.

[33]  Antonio Calvo-Morata,et al.  Applicability of a Cyberbullying Videogame as a Teacher Tool: Comparing Teachers and Educational Sciences Students , 2019, IEEE Access.

[34]  Daniel I. S. Rosenbloom,et al.  Imitation dynamics of vaccination behaviour on social networks , 2011, Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

[35]  Y. Bar-dayan,et al.  Differences in public emotions, interest, sense of knowledge and compliance between the affected area and the nationwide general population during the first phase of a bird flu outbreak in Israel. , 2007, The Journal of infection.

[36]  Tanya Rosenblat,et al.  Social Networks and Vaccination Decisions , 2007 .

[37]  S. Woolf,et al.  The power of prevention and what it requires. , 2008, JAMA.

[38]  J. Falk,et al.  Policy statement of the “informal science education” ad hoc committee , 2003 .

[39]  K. Back,et al.  Self-disclosure and the volunteer: a source of bias in laboratory experiments. , 1971, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[40]  G. Hein.  Learning Science in Informal Environments: People, Places, and Pursuits , 2009 .

[41]  F. Wilcoxon.  Individual Comparisons by Ranking Methods , 1945 .

[42]  S. Monteiro,et al.  Evaluation of the ZIG-ZAIDS game: an entertaining educational tool for HIV/Aids prevention , 1999 .

[43]  S. Garland,et al.  Web-Based Recruiting for Health Research Using a Social Networking Site: An Exploratory Study , 2012, Journal of medical Internet research.

[44]  P. Batterham.  Recruitment of mental health survey participants using Internet advertising: content, characteristics and cost effectiveness , 2014, International journal of methods in psychiatric research.

[45]  George J. Pappas,et al.  Analysis and Control of Epidemics: A Survey of Spreading Processes on Complex Networks , 2015, IEEE Control Systems.

[46]  J. Wellington.  Formal and informal learning in science: the role of the interactive science centres , 1990 .

[47]  Joel Epstein,et al.  The Impact of a Science Education Game on Students’ Learning and Perception of Inhalants as Body Pollutants , 2011, Journal of science education and technology.

[48]  Karanprakash Singh,et al.  Public knowledge, attitude and behavioural changes in an Indian population during the Influenza A (H1N1) outbreak. , 2010, Journal of infection in developing countries.

[49]  Guy J. Golan,et al.  Agenda Setting and International News: Media Influence on Public Perceptions of Foreign Nations , 2004 .

[50]  J. Lemke,et al.  Documenting and Assessing Learning in Informal and Media-Rich Environments , 2015 .

[51]  Z. Berge,et al.  Student barriers to online learning: A factor analytic study , 2005 .

[52]  Roanne Angiello,et al.  Study Looks at Online Learning vs. Traditional lnstruction. , 2010 .

[53]  H. B. Mann,et al.  On a Test of Whether one of Two Random Variables is Stochastically Larger than the Other , 1947 .

[54]  Jodi Asbell-Clarke,et al.  Challenging games help students learn: An empirical study on engagement, flow and immersion in game-based learning , 2016, Comput. Hum. Behav..

[55]  J. Gordon,et al.  Online Recruitment Methods for Web-Based and Mobile Health Studies: A Review of the Literature , 2015, Journal of medical Internet research.

[56]  Per Backlund,et al.  Educational games - Are they worth the effort? A literature survey of the effectiveness of serious games , 2013, 2013 5th International Conference on Games and Virtual Worlds for Serious Applications (VS-GAMES).

[57]  W. Kruskal,et al.  Use of Ranks in One-Criterion Variance Analysis , 1952 .

[58]  C. Llor,et al.  Correlation Between Healthcare Workers' Knowledge of Influenza Vaccine and Vaccine Receipt , 2004, Infection Control & Hospital Epidemiology.

[59]  Maurizio Porfiri,et al.  Epidemic Spreading in Temporal and Adaptive Networks with Static Backbone , 2020, IEEE Transactions on Network Science and Engineering.