Filtering by
- All Subjects: Mammals
- All Subjects: Obesity in children
- Creators: Hilborn, Anne W.
- Creators: ASU College of Health Solutions
- Peer-reviewed: Peer-reviewed
- Status: Published
Narration of the Urban Jungle Sweet Sixteen encounter between #1 Harar Hyena and #7 Coyote, by Katie Hinde, Tara Chestnut, and Anne W. Hilborn
March Mammal Madness is a science outreach project that, over the course of several weeks in March, reaches hundreds of thousands of people in the United States every year. We combine four approaches to science outreach – gamification, social media platforms, community event(s), and creative products – to run a simulated tournament in which 64 animals compete to become the tournament champion. While the encounters between the animals are hypothetical, the outcomes rely on empirical evidence from the scientific literature. Players select their favored combatants beforehand, and during the tournament scientists translate the academic literature into gripping “play-by-play” narration on social media. To date ~1100 scholarly works, covering almost 400 taxa, have been transformed into science stories. March Mammal Madness is most typically used by high-school educators teaching life sciences, and we estimate that our materials reached ~1% of high-school students in the United States in 2019. Here we document the intentional design, public engagement, and magnitude of reach of the project. We further explain how human psychological and cognitive adaptations for shared experiences, social learning, narrative, and imagery contribute to the widespread use of March Mammal Madness.
Narration of the Urban Jungle Round 2 encounter between #3 Berlin Boar and #6 Bobcat, by Katie Hinde, Jessica Light, Mauna Dasari, and Anne W. Hilborn
Selected narrations, or Play by Plays, to illustrate how matches in the annual March Mammal Madness Tournament are conducted and communicated. Referenced in “March Mammal Madness and the Power of Narrative in Science Outreach” (full citation coming and will link to KEEP record once created).
Many factors influence children’s health behaviors and health outcomes. The Social Ecological Model (SEM) groups these factors into interactive layers, creating a framework for understanding their influence and for designing interventions to achieve positive change. The layers of influence in the SEM include individual, interpersonal, organizational, community, and policy factors (see figure). The New Jersey Child Health Study (NJCHS) was designed to examine how specific layers of the SEM, particularly food and physical activity environments in schools and communities, affect obesity outcomes in children
Many factors influence children’s health behaviors and health outcomes. The Social Ecological Model (SEM) groups these factors into interactive layers, creating a framework for understanding their influence and for designing interventions to achieve positive change. The layers of influence in the SEM include individual, interpersonal, organizational, community, and policy factors.
Since 2018, MMM team members have written sport-style summaries following the live "play-by-play" narration of simulated combatant encounters on social media. These summaries, highlighting key adaptations, human impacts, and other scholarly information, have been provided to educators to describe tournament outcomes to their learners who do not follow the battle narrations "live" on social media.