Puerto Rico Vector Control Unit · Digital lessons

The Puerto Rico Vector Control Unit works to prevent dengue, Zika and chikungunya, and knows prevention starts at school. It had the content to teach about mosquitoes and their control, but spread across materials that weren’t designed for the classroom or for a screen.

That knowledge had to become lessons a teacher could teach and a student could follow, with the rigor of a health agency and the pace of a class.

Three fronts in a single project:

• Educational videos: animated pieces that open each lesson, like the hook for “I am the Aedes aegypti mosquito and I carry diseases”, which moves from the insects we don’t notice to the dangerous ones.
• Digitizing all the content: texts, images, objectives, standards, concepts and vocabulary, brought into an organized digital format.
• The lesson platform: each lesson follows a hook, explore, explain, elaborate and evaluate path, with fun facts, tips, vocabulary, an open question and a final reflection, plus a pre-test and post-test to measure learning.

Lessons include interactive diagrams, such as the mosquito’s anatomy with its labeled parts. True-or-false assessments have an answer counter and keep the periodic table and a calculator at hand.

The Unit’s content became a complete classroom journey: teachers have objectives, standards and assessments in one place, and students learn to recognize the mosquito and prevent the diseases it carries, starting at home and at school.