About Co-IMMUNicate
What is Co-IMMUNicate?
Co-IMMUNication is a collaborative project funded by a ScotPEN-Wellcome Public Engagement award (2020-2023). We are a group of researchers and teachers working together to help our local communities understand more about respiratory viruses and how our immune cells defend us against them.
We are working together to design fun and interactive activities that mirror the research we conduct at the University of Glasgow. This research seeks to understand how respiratory infections change the cells that make up the respiratory tract and the immune cells that move into the lung to protect it from a future attack.
We are creating a multi-layered engagement project ensuring sustained impact on the school and local community, increasing knowledge of the importance of immunology research to protect us against infectious diseases. We are enabling pupils to design and build activities to teach and enthuse younger children and their families about the immune system through displays in the school and across Glasgow. Working across disciplines and ages, we are generating numerous resources and best practices that we seek to share widely. These resources include the ‘Co-IMMUNicate App’ which uses augmented reality, quizzes, and a fun game to help us more widely disseminate our project.
Each Spring we work with the Primary 6/7 class at Anderston primary school in Glasgow to design new activities that help enthuse and explain what happens when people are infected with a respiratory virus. We aim to take the best of these activities to the Glasgow Science Festival each year. Our plans for the last two years have been limited by the impact of the COVID19 pandemic but we have participated via ‘Science on your Sofa’ and at the 2021 in-person Science Festival.
Snap the QR code below to download our app
