Students investigate how disease spreads across connected societies by comparing the Black Death with a modern outbreak and using statistics, historical evidence, and community perspectives to recommend realistic prevention strategies. They apply engineering and design thinking to create a public health campaign or policy brief and a prototype that could reduce infection spread, with language accessibility built into their communication. Through feedback from classmates during gallery walks and from clinic or hospital partners, they revise their ideas for a public audience of health officials and community members. The experience builds students’ ability to analyze global challenges, interpret data, communicate across languages, and defend evidence-based solutions.

Students will compare the Black Death with a modern epidemic or pandemic to identify historical patterns in globalization, disease spread, public response, and government action, and use those comparisons to recommend evidence-based prevention strategies. They will gather, organize, and analyze outbreak data using statistics, graphs, equations, and rates; evaluate tradeoffs and constraints in competing public health and engineering solutions; and test or refine a prototype that reduces infection spread. Students will communicate findings through a multilingual policy brief or public health campaign, incorporating Spanish language accessibility and feedback from peers, community members, and health professionals during gallery walks and the final public exhibition. They will also strengthen collaboration, discussion, and reflection skills by revising work after each milestone and using weekly team protocols to track growth in inquiry, communication, and problem-solving.

Students will create outbreak evidence boards, comparison charts linking the Black Death to a modern epidemic or pandemic, multilingual interview questions, and statistical displays that use graphs, rates, and trend lines to analyze spread and response. As the project develops, teams will produce draft policy claims, campaign mockups, prototype sketches, test plans, and revision notes from gallery walk feedback and consultation with clinic or hospital partners. By the end, each team will present a polished data-driven policy brief or public health campaign with language-accessible materials, an infection-prevention device prototype, and a visual display for the Community Health Action Forum. Each student will also complete a short individual reflection explaining how historical evidence, quantitative analysis, and design choices informed the team’s recommendations.

Open with an Outbreak Evidence Café using case cards, infection-rate graphs, maps of trade routes and travel networks, short multilingual public health messages, and concerns from a nearby clinic partner. In teams, students rotate through stations, annotate patterns they notice between the Black Death and a modern outbreak, and generate questions about spread, policy, communication, and design solutions. A nurse, epidemiologist, or infection-control specialist then responds to a few student questions and introduces a real local challenge, such as reducing transmission in shared community spaces. Close with a quick team debrief in which students draft an initial claim about what makes disease prevention effective and post one question they want to investigate first.

Host a Community Health Action Forum where teams deliver 3-minute pitches of their data-driven policy brief or multilingual public health campaign, demonstrate their infection-prevention prototype, and display evidence boards showing Black Death comparisons, outbreak statistics, and design revisions. Invite families, school leaders, peers, and a nearby hospital or clinic partner such as a nurse, epidemiologist, or infection-control specialist to circulate, ask questions, and leave response cards for each team. Structure the event like a public health briefing with stations for historical analysis, data visualizations, language-accessible messaging, and prototype testing so students can show how they used evidence, feedback from gallery walks, and community input to refine their recommendations. End with a short individual reflection submitted after the forum explaining how historical patterns, statistics, and design choices shaped their final disease prevention strategy.