From Left: Cianne Coutinho, Md Ramim Tanver Rahman, Blair Reid and Paige Vowels
31 March 2026
By Aideen Teeling
From googly-eyed germs and Minecraft heroes to bacteria braving antibiotic snowstorms, university students across Canada got creative in explaining a serious threat — antimicrobial resistance — in the second edition of the Explain It Like I’m 6 Contest.
Three prizes were handed out, along with the Kids’ Choice Award, at the One Health Antimicrobrial Resistance (AMR) and Emerging Zoonoses Conference held in Calgary in March 2026.
The contest was launched during World Antimicrobial Resistance Awareness Week and organized by the Emerging & Pandemic Infections Consortium in partnership with the Canadian Antimicrobial Resistance Network (CAN-AMR-Net) and bioMérieux Inc.
To spread awareness around AMR, we challenged students or recent graduates at Canadian universities to get creative and explain an aspect of AMR science that is crucial or often misunderstood in a way that a 6-year-old would be able to understand. Contestants could submit either a series of 3 images or a 3-minute-or-less video to convey their ideas. The same conditions applied to the first edition of the contest: Explain It Like I’m 6: A Vaccine Education Contest.
We received over 30 submissions from 10 universities across Canada, representing a diverse range of scientific backgrounds and artistic styles. Submissions were judged on creativity, relevance, clarity, out-of-the-box thinking, and above all, accuracy. The winners were determined by a panel of judges from EPIC, CAN-AMR-Net, and bioMérieux, while the Kids’ Choice Award winner was selected by voting from five classes of first graders.
“The submissions showcased the creativity of budding science communicators throughout the country,” says Natasha Christie-Holmes, director of strategy and partnerships at EPIC. “The Explain It Like I’m 6 Contest contributes to a key aspect of infectious disease research that EPIC is committed to: public engagement with science.”
Antimicrobials, like antibiotics and antivirals, are drugs we use to kill microorganisms such as bacteria, viruses and fungi that cause infections. Antibiotics like penicillin have been used for decades to cure previously untreatable infections and have saved countless lives.
Antimicrobial resistance refers to the ability of microorganisms to evolve to become no longer susceptible to a particular drug, and researchers have established that the frequency of resistance mutations increases with antimicrobial usage. Combating AMR requires multiple approaches, including greater awareness among the public and health care providers to address antimicrobial overuse, as well as research and development into new drugs and strategies to treat microbial infections.
Here are our winners:
First place: Cianne Coutinho for “Gerry & The Germs: The Everyday Fight Against Antimicrobial Resistance”
For Cianne Coutinho, the Explain It Like I’m 6 contest was an opportunity to put an adage her mother told her to the test: “If you can’t explain it on a postcard, you don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Coutinho, a second-year undergraduate student in molecular biology and genetics at McMaster University, is no stranger to contests and says she first came across the concept of AMR in an elementary school competition when she gave a speech on microbes in French.
Years later, she comes across AMR almost daily in her university courses. When she heard about the contest, she saw it as an opportunity to not only address science literacy issues on social media platforms, but also as a way to connect with her long-time passion of stop motion animation.
Coutinho submitted a stop motion-animated video explaining how, Gerry, a googly-eyed lump of clay, could combat the bad germs in his body. She says she chose this medium because “[stop motion] is so engaging whether you’re a kid or an adult.”
“Cute characters can really capture an audience,” she says. To ensure her submission was understandable to a wide audience, she asked for feedback from her friends studying humanities and engineering and “learned that whether you’re an adult or a kid, you can still fall in love with Gerry.”
She says before this she hadn’t realized how hard it can be to communicate science clearly and came away from the contest with an appreciation for science writing.
As an aspiring clinician scientist, Coutinho says it was important for her to break down this complex topic into its simplest form and to give kids tangible steps to combat AMR like finishing your medicine and never sharing antibiotics.
“All topics can be explained in a way that’s exciting and new,” she says.
Second place: Md Ramim Tanver Rahman for “The Great Bug Battle”
“Biofilms are everywhere,” says Md Ramim Tanver Rahman, who was looking for a way to explain this concept not just to 6-year-olds, but also to other scientists, when he entered his animated video titled “The Great Bug Battle” into the contest.
Rahman is a postdoctoral researcher at the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute at the University of Ottawa, where he studies the formation of sticky bacterial colonies — or biofilms — on orthopedic implants that can cause serious infections and complications after common surgeries like hip and knee replacements.
In his video, Rahman explains how antibiotics are like a snowstorm that makes your body uninhabitable for bacteria, but smart bacteria can huddle together for warmth to form a biofilm or “big bug blanket” to survive the storm. He reassures the audience that simple interventions like scrubbing away biofilms, such as the plaque on your teeth, and finishing all your antibiotics can help keep you healthy. His submission was one of the few which tackled a specific mechanism of antimicrobial resistance in depth.
Rahman says he came up with this analogy when his own young daughter was sick, and explained to her, “we are taking some medicine because the bacteria making you sick are wearing warm clothes.” His daughter got to be his assistant producer in making this video, providing real-time feedback during its creation, and says she will be sharing it with her classmates at school.
“I’m not a native English speaker,” Rahman says, who was amazed by the ability of generative artificial intelligence to assist him in creating the animation and high-quality voice over for the video. He says he’s inspired to do public outreach to share his video with other classrooms in Ottawa and to work on more videos that explain important scientific concepts to kids throughout his career.
“It’s a good field to study,” he says. “I feel, for myself, I am the resistance guy.”
Third place: Blair Reid for “The Tale of the Four Sneaky Microbes”
Between practicums, exams and coursework, Blair Reid, a third-year undergraduate nursing student at Western University, says she had one free weekend to put together her submission to the Explain It Like I’m 6 Contest.
Reid submitted a hand-illustrated storybook to the contest, titled “The Tale of the Four Sneaky Microbes”, in which she uses funny voices and eye-catching illustrations to explain AMR through the lens of a young boy named Fred who becomes sick with a bacterial infection.
“I deal with a lot of patients who are MRSA [methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus] positive,” Reid says. She says this contest reminded her of the important role she plays in combatting AMR as a nurse, not just through infection control protocols, but as a health educator.
“I really love health teaching — that part of nursing is really important,” she says. She recalls a pivotal moment from her own childhood when a child life specialist helped her understand the surgery she needed to have and what the recovery process would be. Now as an adult, Reid sees herself in this role and hopes to specialize in pediatric nursing after graduating.
She says the biggest challenge of the contest was translating the nitty gritty science in a way so that kids would understand why AMR is such an important problem. Writing a storybook helped her break down the concepts into as few words as possible and expand the ideas with pictures instead, she explains.
“When [kids] can understand something, they want to teach their parents,” says Reid.
“Kids are really big and passionate change makers.”
Kids’ Choice Award: Paige Vowels for “Steve Explains Antimicrobial Resistance”
Paige Vowels was looking for a way to get back in touch with her creative side, after completing her master’s degree in epidemiology and biostatistics at Western University, when she was conceptualizing her submission to the Explain It Like I’m 6 contest.
“What are 6-year-olds into?” was the first question Vowels posed to herself. She had just finished two years of working with seniors for her thesis work on mental health in older adults. Not having much of a background in microbiology, Vowels said she spent a long time teaching herself about AMR and knew it would be a challenge to reduce all she had learned to just 3 minutes of information in a way that would be engaging for kids.
She landed on submitting an animated video titled “Steve Explains Antimicrobial Resistance”, which used characters from the popular video game Minecraft to explain AMR — with the villainous piglins representing bacteria and the heroic Steve representing the immune system.
Her video was indeed well received by our expert judges — students in five Grade 1 and 2 classes across Calgary and Toronto — who agreed Vowels’ video was “very kid friendly!”
Whether you’re talking to kids or seniors, Vowels says it’s important to step outside of your academic bubble and focus on the impact of your research, as well as what behavioral changes people can make to help.
Vowels says after finishing her graduate studies, she continually sharpened her science communication skills by writing for her blog, World of Epidemiology, where she tackles misinformation around vaccines.
“[Research] doesn’t really mean anything to the general public unless you can spread it in a way that they can understand.”
We would like to thank the grade one classes at Earl Beatty Public School (Toronto), Swansea Public School (Toronto) and Bearspaw School (Calgary) for their enthusiastic participation in the Kids’ Choice Award judging.