About
The model starts with a 1000 X 500 px canvas, which represent the school. 300 randomly placed particles represent the students. Blue students are healthy, yellow students are infected but asymptomatic. Orange students have symptoms. The model starts with one sick student. When a sick student comes in contact with a healthy student, the healthy student will become sick. The newly infected student can also infect others. After 50 steps, with a 10% chance, the yellow particles will turn orange. There are three buttons below the model. The Step button steps the model once. The Play button steps the model repeatedly. The Reset button resets the model and causes it to stop playing. Once the Play button is pressed, it cannot be pressed again until the Reset button is pressed.
What were the questions you planned for your model to help answer?
The question the model aspired to answer was how quickly does COVID-19 spread among students in an average school?
What were your hypotheses about the answers to the questions when you started?
We thought that COVID-19 would spread faster among a school with many students because more students means more interaction, which means that there is a higher chance of the virus being spread.
What results and behaviors did you observe from using your model?
We noticed that more students meant that people would get infected faster because there was more interaction between students. The smaller the canvas, the faster the infection will spread as well.
Did your observations match your expectations? If not, why do you think they did not? What did this teach you about the topic you were modeling?
Our expectations matched our obervations. The more students there were, the more they would come in contact with each other. Also, the smaller the school, the more contact they were forced to have with each other, making the spread of the disease faster.
Did the results support your initial hypotheses? If not, what were your new hypotheses?
The results supported our intial hypotheses. Our intial hypotheses matched the behaviors that were observed in the model. The disease spread faster as more contact was initiated between students, but with realistic terms by giving students a 10 percent chance that they will contract the virus since students are not high risk for COVID-19.
What changes did you have to make to your plans and your models to make your models more accurate and/or realistic?
Initially, we had a lot of ideas that we wanted to incude in our model, but we ran out of time for some of them. We did research on how contagious the virus is, how quickly it can spread from person to person, and the incubation time of the virus to create a realistic model. We planned to have different types of people. Healthy, infected but no symptoms, infected with minor symptoms, and infected with severse symptoms.
What did you learn from working on this project?
We learned after working on this project that although students are at a lower risk of contracting COVID-19 in comparison to older age groups, that doesn't mean students are initaly safe from still contracting the disease due to high amounts of interaction between students especially in smaller settings.
Citations
Popsci Disease Transfer Visual
FDA Coronavirus Frequently Asked Questions
