Educating in antimicrobial resistance awareness: adaptation of the Small World Initiative program to service-learning.

The Small World Initiative (SWI) and Tiny Earth are a consolidated and successful education programs rooted in the USA that tackle the antibiotic crisis by a crowdsourcing strategy. Based on active learning, it challenges young students to discover novel bioactive-producing microorganisms from environmental soil samples. Besides its pedagogical efficiency to impart microbiology content in academic curricula, SWI promotes vocations in research and development in Experimental Sciences and, at the same time, disseminates the antibiotic awareness guidelines of the World Health Organization.