Simpocalypse for High School: Biology/Engineering

In this project, you'll learn how, in broad strokes, modelling tools like Simpocalypse can be used to help make decisions about public policy problems, like the COVID-19 pandemic. You probably won't come up with the next genius disease containment idea or anything, but you will learn how the people who do that kind of thing need to put together such diverse fields as biology, sociology, engineering, mathematics, and computer science to try and make effective public health policy.

The Standards

This project is designed to address Michigan Science Standards HS-ETS1-1, HS-ETS1-2, HS-ETS1-3, and HS-ETS1-4, as well as ISTE Students standards 1c, 3a, 3b, 3c, 3d, 4a, 4b,4c, 4d, 5a, 5b, 5c, 5d, 6a, 6c, 6d, 7b, and 7c. For more information, you can read our standards summary document, Michigan's standards document, and the ISTE's standards page.

The Rubric

You can see the rubric that your teacher will use to grade your project here.

The Project

Over the next five weeks, we should be pretty busy. You'll be learning about the biology of infectious diseases in general and SARS-CoV-2 in particular, figuring out how to use Simpocalypse, and most importantly creating your Simpocalypse models so you can make proposals based on them.

Important Links

• The Simpocalypse website, where you can download Simpocalypse itself, and get help with using it.
• The CODAP website provides access to the excellent CODAP data science application. While you're not doing lots of fancy statistical analysis like you would in the statistics project, you might still find CODAP useful to look at your data in something more flexible than Simpocalypse's built-in graphs.
• You might even want to use Simpocalypse's database export feature to analyze your data. If you don't know any computer coding, or you don't know how to code with SQL in particular, SQLiteBrowser is the easiest way to open Simpocalypse database files.
• If you're a teacher, you can get more information about the project from our summary presentation and sign your class up with our signup form.

Step By Step

• The STEM Explorer team will give you an introductory lecture to start the project off. If we can, we'll come to your school and talk to you in person, but otherwise we'll try to give you a live lecture over videoconference, or ask you to watch our prerecorded video lecture.
• Once we're done with the preliminaries, we'll need to review some basics about the biology and history of infectious diseases. The STEM Explorer team is creating some lesson plans to help you with this, but you'll also probably spend some time with your teacher's ordinary biology lessons.
• You'll also need to do your research about the COVID-19 pandemic. This information is changing quickly, but you'll want to learn the best current information on how SARS-CoV-2 (which causes COVID-19) is spread, how likely it is to spread from one person to another, who is most susceptible, exactly how deadly it is, and the current proposals for fighting it.
• Next, you'll learn how to use the Simpocalypse application. The Simpocalypse website contains, besides the download links for Simpocalypse itself, the Simpocalypse manual, some suggested activities, and some tutorials to help you get started. Depending on your situation, the STEM Explorer team might come to your school to help, or give lectures over videoconference.
• Once you know how Simpocalypse works, you'll break out into teams to create models of COVID-19 in Simpocalypse. You should try to get your results to match the current understanding of the real-life disease as closely as possible.
• Now you'll formulate a plan for controlling COVID-19 using the Societal Controls available in Simpocalypse. You'll need to test your plan in your Simpocalypse model to get an idea of how well it might work.
• Once you're finished, you'll present your plan to the rest of the class. You should explain how your proposal is similar to or different from current real-life ideas for controlling COVID-19.
• Finally, your whole class will decide which plan you like best, and present it to the STEM Explorer team, who will include it on the Simpocalypse website.