Plan Your Outbreak Scenario

Download the Operation Outbreak mobile app and Enhanced Educator Toolkit, which includes detailed facilitator guides, role descriptions and scenario templates.

Decide which roles your students will play: public health officials, government leaders, journalists, healthcare workers, essential workers, vulnerable populations and community members. Each role comes with specific responsibilities and decision-making authority that mirrors real societal structures.

Plan your scenario's key decision points—perhaps a school closure debate, vaccine distribution priorities, or misinformation crisis—that will force students to grapple with difficult trade-offs.

Use your grant to cover costs for costumes, signage, props and printed materials. Consider partnering with other teachers to involve multiple classes simultaneously, creating authentic scale and complexity.

Recruit additional adults to help facilitate, playing supporting roles and guiding students through scenarios.

Prepare Roles and Materials

Use your funding to acquire costumes and props that help students embody their roles. Lab coats for healthcare workers, suits for government officials, press badges for journalists—these visual elements create psychological investment that enhances engagement and learning.

Print role cards explaining each character's responsibilities, goals and available resources. Create signage transforming your space into different zones: a command centre for public health officials, a press office for journalists, an emergency room for healthcare workers.

Organise your classroom into these stations so students physically move between sectors during the simulation. Test all technology thoroughly, ensuring the app works smoothly across numerous devices simultaneously.

Launch the Immersive Experience

Begin with a dramatic briefing: a new pathogen is set to emerge, and the class must respond. Assign students to roles, providing role cards that explain their responsibilities and decision-making authority. Start the mobile app to initiate virtual disease transmission.

As students settle into their roles, prepare for the spread to begin. Watch as students develop new symptoms via virtual avatars and different sectors respond: public health officials analyze spread patterns, biomedical researchers work to identify the pathogen at work, journalists interview key players, healthcare workers prepare for patients.

Encourage students to debate options, negotiate compromises and live with the consequences of their choices as the simulation progresses.

Debrief Multiple Perspectives

After the simulation concludes, bring all students together to share their experiences from different perspectives. Display the transmission data captured by the app, showing how the disease actually spread compared to what officials thought was happening.

Ask each role group to explain their biggest challenges: healthcare workers might discuss overwhelming demand and limited resources, journalists might reflect on balancing speed with accuracy, government officials might explore the tension between public health and economic concerns.

This multi-perspective debrief reveals how outbreak response requires coordination across society and why communication breakdowns create dangerous gaps. Facilitate discussion about which decisions proved effective, what they would change in retrospect, and how their simulated experience connects to real outbreaks they've studied.

Many students report profound insights about the complexity of public health decision-making, developing empathy for officials managing actual crises whilst recognizing the importance of evidence-based policy.

Document and Share Impact

Capture photos, student reflections and key learning moments from your Enhanced Simulation experience. Submit your impact survey and receipts to ChangeX to receive your final funding installment.

Consider having students create presentations, articles or videos about their experience, extending the learning whilst building media literacy skills. Invite other teachers to observe future simulations so they can replicate the experience in their own schools.

Many schools showcase their Operation Outbreak Enhanced Simulation at open houses or parent events, demonstrating innovative teaching methods whilst celebrating student learning.

Share your story with the broader Operation Outbreak community through social media or the program website, inspiring other educators and contributing to collective knowledge about best practices.

Document what worked well and what you'd adjust for next time, building institutional knowledge that improves each subsequent simulation. Consider making the Enhanced Simulation an annual tradition that becomes a signature experience students anticipate throughout high school.