Mind-Boggling Medical History
Lead Research Organisation:
University of Oxford
Department Name: English Faculty
Abstract
'Mind-Boggling Medical History' is a medical history card game created by Dr Sarah Chaney, Dr Sally Frampton and Sarah Punshon. The game is a fun and interactive way of introducing non-academic audiences to ideas from historical and contemporary science and medicine. The card game will be available both in hard copy and as an online resource. Players are challenged to sort medical facts and theories into three categories: Current Model, Disproved and Fictional and can play against one another as both individuals and teams. Simple and entertaining, it invites questions as to the value and purpose of history and introduces participants to new scholarship from the Constructing Scientific Communities (Conscicom) project.
This project builds upon a game that has been used as an occasional museum event to create a new educational resource to teach critical thinking and research skills to museum visitors, tertiary health care students and school students. It will also be made accessible to the general public. Accompanying guidance will help teachers and educators use the physical game in classroom sessions, while interested adults and school audiences will use the online game at home and school. The expanded resource will be developed with the help of specialists including museum practitioners and health care educators, and students and teachers will be involved in the testing.
The card game will be distributed to nursing lecturers, librarians and museum practitioners. The online resource will be freely available via the high profile citizen science portal Zooniverse (www.zooniverse.org) who are already project partners on Conscicom. The game, and feedback from it, will also help inform learning activities for the Science Museum's new medical galleries, due for completion in 2019.
By using the game to experiment with and evaluate public perceptions of medicine, Mind-Boggling Medical History focuses on an important objective of Conscicom: to enhance understanding of public engagement with science since the late Victorian era and to break down divisions between professional science and the public. Furthermore, it promises to be an innovative way of carrying out interdisciplinary work, showing how historical facts and theories can be used to prompt questions about current day understandings of medicine, the need for health practitioners to stay up to date in their field, and the impact changes in medical knowledge can have on patient care.
This project builds upon a game that has been used as an occasional museum event to create a new educational resource to teach critical thinking and research skills to museum visitors, tertiary health care students and school students. It will also be made accessible to the general public. Accompanying guidance will help teachers and educators use the physical game in classroom sessions, while interested adults and school audiences will use the online game at home and school. The expanded resource will be developed with the help of specialists including museum practitioners and health care educators, and students and teachers will be involved in the testing.
The card game will be distributed to nursing lecturers, librarians and museum practitioners. The online resource will be freely available via the high profile citizen science portal Zooniverse (www.zooniverse.org) who are already project partners on Conscicom. The game, and feedback from it, will also help inform learning activities for the Science Museum's new medical galleries, due for completion in 2019.
By using the game to experiment with and evaluate public perceptions of medicine, Mind-Boggling Medical History focuses on an important objective of Conscicom: to enhance understanding of public engagement with science since the late Victorian era and to break down divisions between professional science and the public. Furthermore, it promises to be an innovative way of carrying out interdisciplinary work, showing how historical facts and theories can be used to prompt questions about current day understandings of medicine, the need for health practitioners to stay up to date in their field, and the impact changes in medical knowledge can have on patient care.
Planned Impact
Mind-Boggling Medical History is an innovative, fun, flexible public engagement tool designed to open up medical history to general audiences. Principally, it is a way for those who are not humanities scholars, including museum professionals, museum audiences, healthcare educators and students and younger audiences to engage critically with medical humanities. It is also a method of bringing research emerging from Constructing Scientific Communities to new and diverse audiences through discussion, debate and dissemination.
Originally constructed as a card game to be hosted by its creators at museum events, Follow-on Funding would enable the transformation of the facilitated game into a standalone resource that can be be played without the assistance of an academic expert and which may be adapted to suit a range of audiences and environments. The resource will come in two formats, both of which will be developed with direct involvement of members of the target audiences, as well as other relevant experts in each field, such as museum curators. The first is a card game and will be targeted at museum professionals, healthcare educators and their students. Using a hard copy of the game means it can be easily played at interactive and outreach events hosted by museums or by groups of students in seminars or even at home. The hard copy format also enables us to create a beautifully designed, attractive set of cards (with sufficient cards for 5 separate rounds of the game), with accompanying instructions for educators including ideas for questions and debates following on from the topics raised. The project will investigate the potential of selling this commercially via museum shops and other selected outlets, in order to ensure that the resource can continue to be made available after the end of the grant.
As well as this, there will be a freely available online resource with accompanying instructions and guidance. The online version will be built via the Zooniverse platform (www.zooniverse.org), a citizen science portal which currently has over 1 million registered volunteers and with a high media profile. The online version is intended for use as an introduction to classroom settings, as homework for students or to be played by individual visitors in a museum gallery or at home. The online version will also have links to additional information so that players may find out more about any of the medical facts or theories on the cards.
Targeted dissemination and marketing will ensure that the game reaches the intended audiences. The project partners are well-placed to maximise impact to these groups, through established routes of communication. The Science Museum is visited by 175,000 Key Stage 3 & 4 children each year, the Museum of the History of Science has over 180,000 annual vistors, while the Royal College of Nursing has nearly 41,000 student members and an active network of nursing teachers and lecturers. The game will be promoted through email and print campaigns and in-person visits to the Science Museum, Museum of the History of Science and RCN Library & Heritage Centre.
The game is intended to stimulate players' interest in - and broaden their knowledge of - historical and contemporary medicine. It is also a pedagogical tool designed to aid criticial thinking about the role of history, and the difference between past and current medical theories and practices.
As well as informing and disseminating, evaluation metrics derived from the online version of the game and during the workshops piloting the game, will be critical in enabling future public engagement projects to use our findings to improve their own.
Originally constructed as a card game to be hosted by its creators at museum events, Follow-on Funding would enable the transformation of the facilitated game into a standalone resource that can be be played without the assistance of an academic expert and which may be adapted to suit a range of audiences and environments. The resource will come in two formats, both of which will be developed with direct involvement of members of the target audiences, as well as other relevant experts in each field, such as museum curators. The first is a card game and will be targeted at museum professionals, healthcare educators and their students. Using a hard copy of the game means it can be easily played at interactive and outreach events hosted by museums or by groups of students in seminars or even at home. The hard copy format also enables us to create a beautifully designed, attractive set of cards (with sufficient cards for 5 separate rounds of the game), with accompanying instructions for educators including ideas for questions and debates following on from the topics raised. The project will investigate the potential of selling this commercially via museum shops and other selected outlets, in order to ensure that the resource can continue to be made available after the end of the grant.
As well as this, there will be a freely available online resource with accompanying instructions and guidance. The online version will be built via the Zooniverse platform (www.zooniverse.org), a citizen science portal which currently has over 1 million registered volunteers and with a high media profile. The online version is intended for use as an introduction to classroom settings, as homework for students or to be played by individual visitors in a museum gallery or at home. The online version will also have links to additional information so that players may find out more about any of the medical facts or theories on the cards.
Targeted dissemination and marketing will ensure that the game reaches the intended audiences. The project partners are well-placed to maximise impact to these groups, through established routes of communication. The Science Museum is visited by 175,000 Key Stage 3 & 4 children each year, the Museum of the History of Science has over 180,000 annual vistors, while the Royal College of Nursing has nearly 41,000 student members and an active network of nursing teachers and lecturers. The game will be promoted through email and print campaigns and in-person visits to the Science Museum, Museum of the History of Science and RCN Library & Heritage Centre.
The game is intended to stimulate players' interest in - and broaden their knowledge of - historical and contemporary medicine. It is also a pedagogical tool designed to aid criticial thinking about the role of history, and the difference between past and current medical theories and practices.
As well as informing and disseminating, evaluation metrics derived from the online version of the game and during the workshops piloting the game, will be critical in enabling future public engagement projects to use our findings to improve their own.
Publications
Chaney S
(2023)
Mind-Boggling Medical History: creating a medical history game for nurses
in Science Museum Group Journal
| Title | Mind-Boggling Medical History card game |
| Description | The resource is a physical card game designed to introduce ideas from the history of medicine in a fun and informative way to two number of key audiences: nursing students and school students (adaptable for Key Stages 3 to 5). |
| Type Of Art | Artefact (including digital) |
| Year Produced | 2018 |
| Impact | Mind-Boggling Medical History was launched in February 2018 as a physical card pack, initially available for free to those working in education, nursing, public engagement and museums. There is also an online version of the game where the cards can be downloaded freely by anyone (https://mbmh.web.ox.ac.uk/). To date, the game has been widely distributed to our key audiences: nearly 300 free copies have been given on request. The game has been made available via museum, library and history mailing lists, to requests on Twitter, at public engagement events and at the Society for the Social History of Medicine and UK Association for the History of Nursing conferences in 2018. We have had requests for the game from as far afield as Nigeria and New Zealand, and copies of the card game have also been requested by public health specialists, lecturers in paramedical science, doctors, secondary school teachers, NHS library staff and museum professionals across the breadth of the UK. As we planned, a key audience for the game has been nurses and at least a third of the free card packs have gone to a nursing audience. Eighty of these were given out at the 2018 RCN Education Conference, an event targeted at UK health care educators interested in the future of nursing education and practice in the UK. RCN library staff use the game in their sessions with regional offices (nurses and trade union reps), and copies have also been distributed to the RCN libraries in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. A competition to win 5 copies of the game published in the RCN Bulletin (the magazine sent to 430,000 RCN members) received more than 90 entries. Thus, Mind-Boggling Medical History is now being used on a national level as a learning resource for those involved in the education of nursing students. Using Mind-Boggling Medical History to make a connection between theory, evidence and practice has worked well in a nursing education setting, and the game has proven particularly popular with nursing lecturers and university librarians, as a way to introduce the searching and critical evaluation skills students need to engage with research literature. Since the full game was made available in 2018, Basildon and Thurrock University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, for example, have used it in an induction programme to the library services for new student nurses and midwives, reaching 48 students to date. Nursing librarians use the online game as an ice breaker for students. Students choose the topic they are interested in, and library staff facilitate the session by reading the questions and going with a majority vote for the answers, following student discussion. On revealing the correct answers, staff go on to explain the role of library staff: to provide an evidence-based service for NHS workers by ensuring up-to-date material is available, facilitating access to resources and carrying out evidence searches for NHS staff to assist in safe patient care. Similar sessions have been carried out at Anglia Ruskin University and in RCN library regional support sessions around England. We are also taking steps to ensure Mind-Boggling Medical History has a lasting cultural and economic impact and continues to reach a wide audience. Oxford University Innovation (OUI) is a technology transfer company owned wholly by Oxford University. It is tasked with supporting academics from Oxford University when the results from their research produce intellectual property that may be of use to industry and the wider community. OUI intends to further the impact of Mind Boggling Medical History by licensing it to board games providers globally, in order that its mission to increase public engagement and awareness of medical history is achieved. OUI will protect the intellectual property and establish commercial arrangements in order to protect the academics involved while ensuring it reaches its intended goal of public use. |
| URL | https://mbmh.web.ox.ac.uk/home |
| Description | What were the most significant achievements from the award? • That we were able to reach large audiences beyond the academy by creating a freely accessible and educational resource. • That we were able to successfully collaborate with stakeholders and form partnerships with non-academic institutions. • That we were able to produce and pilot a resource that appears to have genuine value for healthcare education. We were successful in our aim of creating a standalone resource that can be played without the assistance of an academic expert and which is adaptable to a number of audiences and environments. As planned, we focused on making the resource relevant to those working in nursing and education. Although we also continued to work with museum professionals throughout the process and benefitted from their expertise in creating the resource, the final product was less tailored towards museum visitors than originally described, as our focus narrowed upon making the resource accessible and valuable to those in nursing and education. However, the card game has been requested by numerous museum professionals, and is being used in museums. We believe we have been successful in our aim of making the resource a useful pedagogical tool which helps aid critical thinking and the evaluation of concepts of evidence. In particular, we have received feedback from those in the nursing community who have used the game that the resource can help clarify the need to keep up-to-date with medical knowledge and promote critical evaluation skills. We have also had commercial interest in the game and have been working with Oxford University Innovation to develop this. One notable outcome is that we found the physical card version of the game to be more popular than the online version for those engaged in educating. Thus, while hundreds of card packs have been sent out to nursing educators, secondary school teachers, public health specialists, academic historians and museum professionals, we have had less uptake then expected for the online version (although it continues to receive a steady stream of traffic). This, I suspect, is related to the fact that the physical card games are better suited for group learning exercises within a classroom or lecture theatre setting. We also had some difficulty finding a platform for the online version of the game, as the Zooniverse platform did not prove to be a suitable fit in the end. We were, however, able to find free hosting on the University of Oxford Mosaic platform (https://mbmh.web.ox.ac.uk/home). Similarly, evaluating the impact of the physical card game has proved easier than it has for the online game, where we are still seeking to accumulate useful amounts of data. This is in part related to technical issues we have had in obtaining the data. |
| Exploitation Route | We believe the outcomes of this project and its success in reaching two of its projected audiences, and particularly nurses, provides useful lessons for humanities academics. First of all we believe it shows the value of working with stakeholders (i.e the projected audiences for impact) and their representative institutions throughout the grant process. In fact we believe, ideally, we should have begun this process before the grant started. Secondly, we think the resource points to the importance of academics drawing on museum methodologies and expertise when creating public engagement resources drawn from humanities research. We believe tools such as gamification and focus groups can help create better outreach. Finally, we believe the project shows the growing importance of conceptualising a 'health' or 'healthcare' humanities that looks beyond the 'medical humanities' (which tends to focus on doctors). There is scope for historians, philosophers and social scientists of medicine, health and illness to create more outputs aimed at allied healthcare professionals. |
| Sectors | Healthcare Leisure Activities including Sports Recreation and Tourism Culture Heritage Museums and Collections |
| Description | Mind-Boggling Medical History was launched in February 2018 as a physical card pack, initially available for free to those working in education, nursing, public engagement and museums. There is also an online version of the game where the cards can be downloaded freely by anyone (https://mbmh.web.ox.ac.uk/). To date, the game has been widely distributed to our key audiences: nearly 300 free copies have been given on request. The game has been made available via museum, library and history mailing lists, to requests on Twitter, at public engagement events and at the Society for the Social History of Medicine and UK Association for the History of Nursing conferences in 2018. We have had requests for the game from as far afield as Nigeria and New Zealand, and copies of the card game have also been requested by public health specialists, lecturers in paramedical science, doctors, secondary school teachers, NHS library staff and museum professionals across the breadth of the UK. As we planned, a key audience for the game has been nurses and at least a third of the free card packs have gone to a nursing audience. Eighty of these were given out at the 2018 RCN Education Conference, an event targeted at UK health care educators interested in the future of nursing education and practice in the UK. RCN library staff use the game in their sessions with regional offices (nurses and trade union reps), and copies have also been distributed to the RCN libraries in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. A competition to win 5 copies of the game published in the RCN Bulletin (the magazine sent to 430,000 RCN members) received more than 90 entries. Thus, Mind-Boggling Medical History is now being used on a national level as a learning resource for those involved in the education of nursing students. Using Mind-Boggling Medical History to make a connection between theory, evidence and practice has worked well in a nursing education setting, and the game has proven particularly popular with nursing lecturers and university librarians, as a way to introduce the searching and critical evaluation skills students need to engage with research literature. Since the full game was made available in 2018, Basildon and Thurrock University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, for example, have used it in an induction programme to the library services for new student nurses and midwives, reaching 48 students to date. Nursing librarians use the online game as an ice breaker for students. Students choose the topic they are interested in, and library staff facilitate the session by reading the questions and going with a majority vote for the answers, following student discussion. On revealing the correct answers, staff go on to explain the role of library staff: to provide an evidence-based service for NHS workers by ensuring up-to-date material is available, facilitating access to resources and carrying out evidence searches for NHS staff to assist in safe patient care. Similar sessions have been carried out at Anglia Ruskin University and in RCN library regional support sessions around England. We are also taking steps to ensure Mind-Boggling Medical History has a lasting cultural and economic impact and continues to reach a wide audience. Oxford University Innovation (OUI) is a technology transfer company owned wholly by Oxford University. It is tasked with supporting academics from Oxford University when the results from their research produce intellectual property that may be of use to industry and the wider community. OUI intends to further the impact of Mind Boggling Medical History by licensing it to board games providers globally, in order that its mission to increase public engagement and awareness of medical history is achieved. OUI will protect the intellectual property and establish commercial arrangements in order to protect the academics involved while ensuring it reaches its intended goal of public use. |
| First Year Of Impact | 2017 |
| Sector | Education,Healthcare,Leisure Activities, including Sports, Recreation and Tourism,Culture, Heritage, Museums and Collections |
| Impact Types | Cultural Policy & public services |
| Description | Consultation with SHAPE arts Peckham, for their project the National Disability Movement Archive and Collection (NDMAC). |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Policy Influence Type | Influenced training of practitioners or researchers |
| Description | Use as an educational resource by the Royal College of Nursing |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Policy Influence Type | Influenced training of practitioners or researchers |
| Impact | Mind-Boggling Medical History is being used by nursing educators, paramedical educators, public health specialists, secondary school teachers, NHS library staff and museum professionals across the breadth of the UK to introduce medical history to new audiences. Feedback from our partners at the RCN confirms MBMH has been used multiple times in a nursing education setting. Our open access website allows users to download the game for free (including an online-only bonus round, 'animals'), and offers specialised teaching resources for nursing and GCSE history students. The interest in the game from nurses in particular indicates the potential for gamifying the medical humanities into an educational resource for healthcare practitioners. By requiring the input of the players themselves, games can lend themselves to the critical thinking and evaluation skills that are valued within the humanities and social sciences, providing a deeper level of engagement with a topic than the top-down dissemination of topic-based material that often takes place in medical humanities. Thus, Mind-Boggling Medical History contributes to an increasingly popular teaching method in nursing. The RCN Library includes games on dysphagia, infection control and addiction among others, often developed by hospital trusts in conjunction with companies such as Focus Games. The game also offers the opportunity to focus on specific areas of the curriculum. A key element was that of evidence-based healthcare, which our nursing focus group identified as especially relevant to the game. Comments received from the 100 students who tried the game at RCN Congress indicated that the game helped clarify the need to keep up-to-date with medical knowledge. To date, the game has been widely distributed tour key audiences: nearly 300 free copies given on request, with at least a third of these going to a nursing audience. Eighty of these were given out at the 2018 RCN Education Conference, an event targeted at UK health care educators interested in the future of nursing education and practice in the UK. RCN library staff use the game in their sessions with regional offices (nurses and trade union reps), and copies have also been distributed to the RCN libraries in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. |
| URL | https://mbmh.web.ox.ac.uk/ |
| Description | John Fell Fund |
| Amount | £100,000 (GBP) |
| Funding ID | Project Code: AXD07140 John Fell Reference:133/072. |
| Organisation | University of Oxford |
| Department | John Fell Fund |
| Sector | Academic/University |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Start | 04/2017 |
| End | 03/2018 |
| Title | Collection of data from SurveyMonkey |
| Description | As part of the project we'll be collecting (non-personal) data from the online (SurveyMonkey) version of the game about what questions from the game users are more likely to get right or wrong and which ones generate most interest. They'll also be a chance for users to pass on feedback through the website and tell us more about their interest in the site and how we could make it better. We plan to write up our findings which will be published in an open access academic publication. The data will be archives on ORA, the Oxford Research Archive and thus available through open access. |
| Type Of Material | Database/Collection of data |
| Year Produced | 2018 |
| Provided To Others? | No |
| Impact | In 2019 we are still collecting this data. However the physical card pack has proved significantly more popular than the online version so we have not yet collected enough data from the online game to use it in evaluation. We also had some technical issues with the platform which meant some of the data was lost. |
| URL | https://mbmh.web.ox.ac.uk/play-online |
| Description | Collaboration with the Royal College of Nursing |
| Organisation | Royal College of Nursing |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Sector | Private |
| PI Contribution | The collaboration has been beneficial to the Royal College of Nursing by enhancing their public engagement portfolio and the visibility of their Library and Heritage services. The College Library team have found the game highly successful in promoting critical thinking among nurses, and helping them engage more directly with nurses in research and teaching, which is a target audience for the library and archive services. The collaboration has provided the College with the academic and technological expertise of the Oxford members of the team, helping to provide a unique resource for the Library to use in their outreach and education. |
| Collaborator Contribution | Collaborating with the Royal College of Nursing has allowed us to bring in the nursing community as key stakeholders from the beginning of the project. It has enabled us to create a resource which has in mind the pedagogical needs and interests of the professional nursing community, one of our key audiences for the game. It has brought us in contact with a range of experts relevant to the project - including nursing educators, information professionals and historians of nursing - and through the College's support and collaboration we have been able to run a number of focus groups and playtesting session that were vital to the games development. The RCN is a professional body and trade union representing around 425,000 nursing and health care workers across the UK; thus the collaboration has also been hugely important in helping us promote and distribute the game to the nursing community across Britain, through conferences, events and shared promotional material. |
| Impact | Meeting with nursing educators to discuss the game. Focus group/playtesting with nurses to advise on the game's development. Focus group/playtesting with teachers to advise on the game's development. Public engagement event at the Curiosity Carnival, Oxford. Set-up and delivery of freelance work by nurse and RCN member Hannah Little to create accompanying learning resources for the game. Launch event for the game (hosted via the Royal College of Nursing. Public engagement event at the Royal College of Nursing Education Conference. Event for the Library Staff Away Day on 17 January 2018 (30 staff from London, Cardiff, Edinburgh and Belfast libraries). Event as part of the Library Open Day aimed at staff on 21 February (attended by around 50 RCN staff from different departments). The i2c2 conference in November 2017 (a conference on innovation, inspiration and creativity attended by around 30 librarians). Team member and RCN collaborator Sarah Chaney also did a talk for about 20 research nurses in their regular seminar series in Cambridge (Cambridge University Hospitals) on 18 Oct 2017. Event as part of the RCN Education Congress, March 2018. Wide distribution of Mind-Boggling Medical History among members of the RCN and others in the nursing community. Recorded use of the game as an educational resource in RCN library regional support sessions around England. |
| Start Year | 2017 |
| Description | Collaboration with the Science Museum |
| Organisation | Science Museum Group |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Sector | Public |
| PI Contribution | The Science Museum's new Medical galleries will open in 2019. If Mind-Boggling Medical History meets the Science Museum's criteria and is successfully trialled with our target audiences then it could form part of the galleries web or possibly floor exhibits. |
| Collaborator Contribution | The Museum has provided support from the curatorial and education teams. They organised a focus group with Museum staff to help us develop the game as well as organiaing playtesting with teachers at one of their 'Science Museum Lates' events. They have also provided promotional support. |
| Impact | The support of the museum helped us to ensure the game would be suitable for museum visitors (one of our key audiences). The museum staff's expertise in medical history, and engagement and outreach work made a direct contribution to the game's development. |
| Start Year | 2017 |
| Title | Mind-Boggling Medical History |
| Description | The intellectual property of Mind-Boggling Medical History (described in grant summary) has been assigned to Oxford University Innovation Limited for commercialisation. |
| IP Reference | |
| Protection | Copyrighted (e.g. software) |
| Year Protection Granted | 2020 |
| Licensed | No |
| Impact | The commercialisation process is at an early stage and as of yet the game has not been further developed by Oxford University Innovation. |
| Title | Mind-Boggling Medical History website |
| Description | This is the online version of the game. Through the website users can download a PDF version of the game, buy a professionally produced copy of the game from a printing company or play the game online (via Survey Monkey). The can also access additional learning resources designed for school and nursing students. |
| Type Of Technology | Webtool/Application |
| Year Produced | 2017 |
| Impact | We have had some technical issues retrieving data from the online version of the game so impact has been limited thus far. The issue has now been rectified and we hope to collect greater amounts of data over the following year. |
| URL | https://mbmh.web.ox.ac.uk/ |
| Description | College open day for schools in widening access scheme |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an open day or visit at my research institution |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Regional |
| Primary Audience | Schools |
| Results and Impact | Team member Dr Sarah Green played the game with students from the City of London Academy, Southwark and Swakeleys School, Hillngdon. The students were visiting St Anne's College Oxford (where the project is based) as part of widening access scheme for school with no tradition of sending students to Oxbridge. The students gave positive feedback about the game, only reporting a desire for more rounds of the game and more time playing it, and displaying a keen interest in the history of medicine. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2018 |
| Description | Curiosity Carnival |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Regional |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | The Curiosity Carnival on Friday 29 September, run by the University of Oxford, was a chance for the public to find out what research is really all about, meet University researchers, ask questions and discover how research affects and changes all our lives. The night was a huge festival of curiosity - a city-wide programme of activities across the University of Oxford's museums, libraries, gardens and woods. There was a wide range of activities for all ages and interests - live experiments, games, stalls, busking, debates, music, dance and a pub-style quiz. Oxford's Curiosity Carnival 2017 joined hundreds of other European cities in celebrating European Researchers' Night. The Carnival brought 10,000 people into Oxford to engage with Oxford University research. Mind-Boggling Medical History were stationed at Broad Street. Approximately 100 people played the game during the 6 Hours that the team were there. Players were invited to leave feedback which, on the whole, was very positive. The game generated lots of conversations and questions, for example of phrenology, neuroscience and reproductive science, with a wide demographic of people. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2017 |
| URL | https://diseasesofmodernlife.org/2017/10/03/songs-cakes-and-games-thoughts-on-performing-baking-and-... |
| Description | IF Science and Ideas Festival 2022 |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Local |
| Primary Audience | Schools |
| Results and Impact | We used Mind Boggling Medical History as part of an event called "What Makes a Good Doctor" introducing school-age students and their families to medicine and medical history. The game sparked discussions with people often wanting to play it twice. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022 |
| URL | https://www.oxinabox.co.uk/women-in-science-at-if-oxford-from-good-doctors-to-toxicologists-cocktail... |
| Description | Lost Late: Night at the Museums |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Regional |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | The event was held on 17th November 2017 at the Pitt Rivers Museum and Oxford University Museum of Natural History as part of the national Being Human Festival. 4000 people were in the museum during the event. 80 people attended Professor Sally Shuttleworth's talk and 75 people played the Mind Boggling Medical History game during the evening. Professor Sally Shuttleworth presented a talk entitled - A Lost Victorian Utopia: Living to 100, at the Pitt Rivers Museum. This talk looked at a Victorian blue-print for a city of health and happiness, where everyone could live to 100. Using cartoons from Punch and other journals, it explored popular comic responses to what were seen as the health fads of the day. The talk was enjoyed by 80 people who engaged in animated discussion. During the evening post doctoral researcher Dr Sally Frampton on the Constructing Scientific Communities project, as well as PI on the Mind Boggling Medical History AHRC funded grant, presented the Mind Boggling Medical History card game. The game explores the weirder side of medical history and current practices in health and medicine. This educational game is designed to challenge preconceptions about history and show how ideas in medicine change for a variety of reasons. Over 75 adults and children played the game over the evening, providing constructive feedback on the questions posed. The event reached relevant audiences, including schoolteachers who are one of the groups the finalised game will be promoted and distributed to. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2017 |
| URL | http://www.torch.ox.ac.uk/lost |
| Description | Mind Boggling Medical History: First Aid special - Victorian Speed, as part of IF festival, 18th October 2018 |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Regional |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | The event was run in conjunction with the IF festival. IF is an annual, city-wide festival run every October in Oxford. It aims for the 'the complexity, wonder and opportunities of scientific research to be explored, challenged and enjoyed across society' (https://if-oxford.com/about/). A Mind-Boggling Medical History public engagement event was run as part of 'Victorian Speed' at the History of Science Museum, Oxford. Broadly, the event explored medical, literary and cultural responses to speed, stress and modernity in the Victorian age. For the event, we created a special round of Mind-Boggling Medical History based around nineteenth century ideas of first aid (to help get people thinking about 19th century responses to accidents and emergencies, often caused by increasing industrialisation, urbanisation etc). The event reached over a 100 people, an audience which mainly consisted of the general public, including children. The event received overwhelmingly positive feedback, with many visitors expressing that the event had caused them to re-assess and value the benefits available within their own lifetime (modern medicine, good work-life balance etc). |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2018 |
| URL | https://diseasesofmodernlife.org/2018/10/24/victorian-speed-time-flies-when-youre-having-fun/ |
| Description | Mind-Boggling Medical History Launch Event |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | The launch event was held on Wednesday 28th February at the Royal College of Nursing to publicly launch the card and online versions of the game. Guests were able to play the game with team members, find out more about its intended audiences and impact. All guests were able to claim a free limited edition version of the card game. Of the 33 guests who completed evaluations. 30 rated the game 5 out of 5, and 3 rated it 4 out of 5. Feedback was positive and constructive, giving us ideas for future |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2018 |
| URL | https://torch.ox.ac.uk/mind-boggling-medical-history-launch |
| Description | Mind-Boggling Medical History at Littlemore Life Lab, IF festival Oxford, 21st October 2018 |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Local |
| Primary Audience | Schools |
| Results and Impact | The event was run in conjunction with the IF festival. IF is an annual, city-wide festival run every October in Oxford. It aims for the 'the complexity, wonder and opportunities of scientific research to be explored, challenged and enjoyed across society' (https://if-oxford.com/about/). A Mind-Boggling Medical History public engagement event was run as part of Littlemore Life Lab, held at the Oxford Academy secondary school, and aimed at primarily at local secondary school students and their families, as well as the general public. The event had 295 attendees with an age range between 3 and 76. Particularly notable about this event was that we were able to play Mind-Boggling Medical History with a younger audience than usual, allowing us to introduced both medical and historical ideas to school students. Many wanted to know more about the statements on the cards and came back for even second or third tries. One of the positive responses given to the game in feedback ("Excellent. Loved the quiz (today - yesterday - fictional). Wish I'd heard about this before") was featured in the main feedback summary. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2018 |
| Description | Mind-Boggling Medical History at Victorian Light Night, as part of Being Human, 16th November 2018 |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Regional |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | We ran a Mind-Boggling Medical History stall as part of Victorian Light Night, a public engagement extravaganza run in the grounds of the Radcliffe Infirmary, University of Oxford. This was part of the national week-long event Being Human, a festival of the humanities. The event attracted somewhere between 700-1000 people, and we had approximately 60-90 people play Mind-Boggling Medical History during the evening, as well as many more spectating. The event hosted a large audience drawn from the general public and covering a wide age range. The event also attracted a number of colleagues from the University of Oxford. One major outcome of this was myself forging new collaborations with colleagues from medicine and philosophy, the latter of which has resulted in new research. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2018 |
| URL | https://diseasesofmodernlife.org/2018/11/27/oh-what-a-victorian-light-night/ |
| Description | Mind-Boggling Medical History at the Royal College of Nursing Education Conference, 20-21 March 2018, Newcastle |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | The RCN Education Conference is an event targeted at UK health care educators interested in the future of nursing education and practice in the UK. Over the course of two days, Mind-Boggling Medical History ran a stall at the event. Eighty free copies of the game were distributed to those who wanted them and many delegates expressed interest in hearing more about the game, or using it in their teaching. The game sparked lots of discussion and feedback on our resource, some of which fed into our later evaluation. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2018 |
| URL | https://www.rcn.org.uk/news-and-events/events/education-2018 |
| Description | Natural History Museum Lates event |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | Science is a cornerstone of modern society but sharing the work of scientists can often be a challenge. Pop Science explored some of the different ways that science can be and has been shared with the world over the generations. From television to poetry, animation to photography. The evening event on 27 October 2017 and attracted over 4000 visitors. It featured a number of projects from the larger Constructing Scientific Communities grant. It gave the public an opportunity to explore some of the ways that people have engaged with and explored science from early Victorian naturalists to the latest citizen science. Hundreds of people attended. At the event member of the Mind-Boggling Medical History team were stationed in one of the corridors. Around 100 people stopped to play the game. Many enjoyed it so much they played multiple rounds! The game sparked conversation and requests for the game to be made publicly available. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2017 |
| URL | http://www.ahrc.ac.uk/newsevents/events/calendar/pop-science-natural-history-museum/ |
| Description | Plasy-testing the game at the "Teacher Zone" at Science Museum Late event |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Regional |
| Primary Audience | Schools |
| Results and Impact | The purpose of the activity was to play-test the developing game with teachers to get their feedback and ensure that their needs and the needs of their students were built into the resource. It was also an early opportunity to promote the game to the teaching community. The play-testing was part of the Science Museum "Teacher Zone" event on the 29th November 2017, a semi-regular event run by the Museum (one of our collaborators) as a chance to find out how the Museum might support their teaching needs. The play-testing was important in helping us find out what didn't work for teachers about the game, for instance there were comments about the vagueness of the language used to word the statements, and difficulties in seeing in what context the game would be played. This had a direct impact on the game's creation, leading us to changing certain statements and ensuring we had accompanying resources available to teachers to they could plan lessons around the game. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2017 |
| Description | University of Oxford press release |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A press release, press conference or response to a media enquiry/interview |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | The University of Oxford published a press release about the game on 12th March 2018. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2018 |
| URL | http://www.ox.ac.uk/news/arts-blog/new-card-game-brings-mind-boggling-medical-history-life |
| Description | Up Close and Medical: Discover London's Medical Museums |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Regional |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | Up. Close and Medical was a free, afternoon event taking a 'marketplace' format, in which the London Museums of Health and Medicine showcased their collections to a public audience. The main audience was the general public but there were also an audience of nursing practitioners. The Royal College of Nursing hosted the event on the 28th October 2017. This was used as an opportunity to showcase and play-test Mind-Boggling Medical History. Using the 'marketplace; as an informal setting, participants 'dropped in' on the play-testing and were given limited instruction. As well as promoting the game, the feedback we got from players at this event was hugely important for helping develop the game further. For instance, eedback such as the need to colour code the different rounds of the game and the need for the cards to have a more "historic" feel led to us changing the design of the game. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2017 |
| URL | https://www.rcn.org.uk/news-and-events/events/up-close-and-medical |
| Description | Wisdom of the Crowd - Marcus du Sautoy event |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | In the final event of the Constructing Scientific Communities project Professor Marcus du Sautoy OBE FRS presented a night of interactive experiments exploring the power of crowds in answering certain numerical questions at the Royal Society, London. As part of the event Professor du Sautoy carried out a number of live interactive quizzes and experiments to test these ideas , and included a number of statements from Mind-Boggling Medical History. The event was recorded and broadcast online and had a significant impact on social media. The most popular tweet for 2017 for the @conscicom account was for the Marcus du Sautoy's lecture, having 21,992 impressions. https://twitter.com/conscicom/status/935101571083403264 The YouTube video below has had over 870 views, as at 6.3.18. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2017 |
| URL | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uVTyGjqqX6o |