Learning about science by being part of experiment

It's a rainy day and the students at Linwood Avenue School are inside for their morning tea break.

Some sit at tables taking turns stacking cups to a timer. Others play Twister on a well-used plastic mat.

Dr Pippa Scott, a pathologist at the University of Otago, Christchurch, is studying whether the kids' interactions lead to the spread of disease.

She has engaged nearly 100 children from Linwood Avenue in her study.

READ MORE:
* Is the future of the ambitious Growing up in NZ Study in doubt?
* NZ scientists call for ban on triclosan after US rules it's harmful to health
* Lyttelton Primary vice principal follows principal out the door

Over the course of two months, Scott swabbed the children's noses several times to check for staphylococcus aureus​, or "staph", a potentially dangerous bacteria.

Scott said staph is common among children and usually doesn't cause any problems when it's found in the nose, but can cause skin infections and potentially fatal blood or respiratory tract infections.

She also gave each child in the study a radio-frequency identification (RFID) tag which kept track of which kids spent the most time in each other's company.

The tags do not have GPS functionality or track the children's locations.

After genetically analysing the different strains of staph, Scott will be able to cross-reference with the data from the RFID tags to see which children had which strain and when.

Scott got the idea to use RFID tags from another researcher. She wanted to get more accurate data than just asking children who they had been hanging out with.

"Clearly when you're asking kids, or anybody, everybody always forgets how long they've spent with whom. So this is more of a direct measurement, which is good."

Scott hopes that the findings of her research will help kids and the rest of the community be safer.

"It might give us more information about how the bug is transmitted outside of the hospital setting and it might then give us some methods to reduce that transmission and therefore reduce illness. Which would be great because New Zealand has quite a problem with staph infections."

In 2011, New Zealand had 127 staphylococcus aureus infections per 1000 population, high for a developed country.

The children greet Scott excitedly when she comes into the class, and she said she loved the time she spent with them on the study.

"They were super funny actually, I really enjoyed it. I ended up going on school camp with them in the end."

Linwood Avenue School principal Gerard Direen was happy to respond to Scotts request for study subjects.

"It sounded like something that was relevant for our children and our community," he said.

"A lot of our kids don't necessarily have the best diets, or pick up a lot of bugs through the winter time."

Direen said the students had fun with the swabbing, and it was a good opportunity to learn about how science is done.

"It's a great learning opportunity, more than just the health issue," he said.

"It has been a cool experience for the children, and a really neat way that the health sector worked with the kids."