Patrick and the Pandemic

Inspiration

I was inspired by children's stories with lots of animals, which happened to have been my favorite kinds as a kid and my cousin and god siblings' current favorites. I believe there is a certain daunting quality to science and it instills unneeded fear in kids and even adults. I wanted to make this sort of thing less scary to children (and possibly adults too) by explaining how pandemics occur and what we can do to make a difference in its effects and future effects. I majored in biomedical sciences in undergrad, and my favorite class by far was Disease Ecology. We read the book Spillover by David Quammen, and I adored how he explained everything as a story. My twist was to take this storytelling method, make it fictional with animal characters, and explain the science behind it in simple terms.

What it does

Patrick and the Pandemic introduces Patrick the Pangolin, who is just as confused about COVID-19 as I'm sure a lot of children are. His new friends explain what they experienced when they too were blamed for causing disease or illness. It allows Patrick to ask all of the questions be, and children may have and explains simplistically how viruses work, how pandemics spread, environmental issues, and how the individual can help.

How I built it

I built it by first writing the story, creating the characters, and then drawing the illustrations and painting them. I then photoshopped the type on the cover and placed all of the pages into Good Note on my iPad to export them as a PDF.

Challenges I ran into

It was a challenge to communicate my thoughts and some complex science and issues to such a young audience. I have experience with tutoring different sciences, but this is to college students who are still far cry from elementary schoolers. It took quite a bit for editing from the original and I utilized my mom, a first-grade teacher, to do some of the final editing.

## Accomplishments that I'm proud of I am proud of the characters I drew. I have never developed characters that I have to re-draw over and over. It was fun to create them simple enough to re-draw, but not too simple to make them boring.

What I learned

I learned some about the process of writing a children's story by researching some blogs of authors and such. It is a must more complex process than I initially anticipated and I now have a much greater appreciation for children's authors.

What's next for Patrick and the Pandemic

Maybe Patrick will come back once COVID-19 has finished and explained what he learned. Or possibly he can become an activist in the community for preserving nature and preventing the crossover of such diseases.

Built With

• goodnotes
• photoshop