Yesterday, our learning specialist for science, Ana, read an article about how games are used to help simulate the spread of disease. She suggested that we could turn this into a collaboration between biology and math, and create a game so that students learn some of the principles of the spread of disease (which is a biology topic) from a mathematical perspective.
I created a simulation so we could test what parameters we may want to use in the classroom so that students are most likely to see that the spread of a disease can be modelled effectivelyh, and see the probability of the infection being spread from person doesn’t change the type of mathematical infection curve much. Try the simulation here.
Some assumptions I’ve made with this simulation:
- Individuals once infected, stay infected.
- Each individual has an equal probability of being infected by anyone else in the population.
- The probability of anyone being infected remains constant over time.
- Individuals can be re-infected.
I don’t know if we will end up using this simulation with students, but if we do, I’d like it to be fairly clear so they can get started using the simulation without much intervention from me.
