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An important biological example of a participatory simulation builds out of an activity presented in the September 1998 issue of the Mathematics Teacher. This activity explores the spread of a disease through a population by having students move around a room and roll dice to see if they had a "high risk" or "low risk" interaction. After the activity is run in a classroom it is then determined who had contracted the disease after each round of rolling the dice, and a graph is constructed. For the version of the activity in the Mathematics Teacher, once the students plotted their results and got the characteristic logistic curve the article just simply presents the logistics formula. No connection is made between the activity and the logistics formula other than that they both create S-curves. Using the tools and approaches of this Project we are able to run the activity and then connect the activity to a StarLogoT model based on a logic paralleling that of the classroom activity. Without having to repeat the activity endless times, students can change aspects of the model to explore the ways in which the parameters of the logistics formula and the shape of the graph of infected people are related. Future versions will have more data collection supported by the hand-held devices (calculators) so that a more detailed understanding of how issues like how many interactions a student has in each round of the game impacts the shape of the infected population graph. Using the approaches and technologies of this grant, existing participatory simulations like this Dice and Disease activity can be significantly enriched and extended.
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Uri
Wilensky |
Walter
M. Stroup |
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