Centre for Inflammation Research

Supercytes Primary School Workshop

May 2018: Donald J. Davidson ran a Supercytes primary school workshop, trialling adaptations to the Supercytes resource designed to help younger learners.

Supercytes is a free inflammation biology / immunology resource pack developed at the MRC Centre for Inflammation Research (CIR) for schools, featuring a presentation, a video about the CIR, cell cartoon characters, worksheets, quizzes, a strategic card game and a dedicated website (see links below).

The pupils at East Linton Primary School were highly participatory and loved playing the game. They doubled their overall class score when the quiz was taken after the activity (compared to the pre-activity scores on the same quiz); 16/25 got a question about the difference between adaptive and innate immunity correct after the activity, 17/25 got the signs of inflammation right, and an astonishing 11/25 (up from 1/25 before the activity) correctly identified the main specialist functions of a neutrophil (which meant knowing to exclude “immune memory” from the list)!

Feedback was very positive; they loved the cartoons and found that this helped them understand better, they thought the card game was "brilliant", found the video about our Centre (and finding out what people do there) very informative and interesting, and "enjoyed hearing the 'big' words"!

 

School children playing the Supercytes card game together
Primary school children playing the Supercytes card game

 

Links:

Supercytes