Learning from failure: Simulating pandemic agreement negotiations in a global health classroom
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Serious games, including simulations, are increasingly used in university teaching, including in medical and humanitarian fields, as well as in political science and international relations. There is less evidence of application in global health pedagogy. This article reports and reflects on the use of a simulation of global pandemic treaty negotiations in a Master of Public Health class on Global Health and International Affairs. Through participant observation and thematic analysis of students' reflective essays we found that the simulation enabled deep learning in line with the assignment objectives (to apply learning from past health crises, engage with key concepts, and experience global health cooperation and challenges), as well as prompted critical reflections on moral dilemmas related to global health cooperation and decolonizing global health. The simulation provided students with an opportunity to engage with wicked problems embedded within global health by drawing on multiple perspectives and approaches. While the students ultimately failed to successfully negotiate a pandemic treaty, it was these failures that provided opportunities for deep learning and critical reflection as they questioned constraints on their underlying motivations and actions. This experience suggests simulations can serve as a particularly apt approach for teaching interdisciplinary approaches to global health as they enable students to apply different sets of knowledge to a particular problem, explore unfamiliar concepts, and critically assess their assumptions.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.013 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".