Teaching K-12 Students Using Jenga! The Impact of Health Behaviors on Community Health, Wellbeing, and Resilience

As society continues to move forward from the COVID-19 pandemic, outreach with K-12 schools is critical for: 1) reestablishing connections with students and teachers and 2) generating interest in health-focused science, technology, engineering, and math (H-STEM) careers. The Department of Kinesiology and Integrative Physiology at Michigan Technological University leveraged the Michigan-Indiana Physiology Understanding Week and National Rural Health Day events to organize a health science-based outreach visit with local schools. Graduate students met with middle and high school students and presented a hands-on activity using the game Jenga to demonstrate the links between health behaviors, disease, and community health. For the activity, students worked together in small teams (e.g., 4-8 students) and were given two Jenga towers (Tower A and Tower B), each representing a community of individuals. The goal of the activity was to keep both towers standing strong. Teams were presented with 12 strips of paper labeled with either a ‘health behavior’ (e.g., physical activity, diet, body weight, smoking) or a ‘disease’ (e.g., heart disease, diabetes, influenza, COVID-19) and accompanying instructions on whether to add or remove blocks from each tower. When presented with a health behavior, students added blocks to Tower A for positive health behaviors (e.g., not smoking) and removed blocks from Tower B for negative health behaviors (e.g., smoking). When a disease was presented, students removed blocks from both towers, but fewer blocks were removed from Tower A compared to Tower B, demonstrating relatively lower diseases rates or severity in that community. As the activity progressed, Tower A retained more blocks than Tower B. For the grand finale, students observed that with the greater strength and stability of Tower A it was better equipped to withstand a natural disaster such as an earthquake that was simulated by students shaking the table that held both towers. At the end of the activity students were able to describe the connections between positive health behaviors and lower rates of disease, and how taken together, these impact overall community health, wellbeing, and resilience. This activity was delivered to 15 different science classes and 225 students ranging from 6-12th grade. The activity was well received by students and teachers and aligned with educational standards that focus on three-dimensional learning. The inclusion of graduate students as guest instructors improved their understanding of public health promotion and provided them with practice communicating health science to a lay audience. Importantly, connecting with K-12 schools to increase interest in H-STEM is an important step for helping to address the current healthcare workforce shortage. This is the full abstract presented at the American Physiology Summit 2023 meeting and is only available in HTML format. There are no additional versions or additional content available for this abstract. Physiology was not involved in the peer review process.