If you’ve ever used interactives or simulations in your teaching, you know that these kind of materials can help illustrate complex concepts or ideas more visually and with more opportunities for student interaction.

With so much in the news about swine flu, using Shodor’s Disease Model, can teach your students about the spread of disease while also addressing a current issue in the news. Shodor has a collection of models, simulations and other materials related to computational science. These materials are nicely set up to teach cross-disciplinary lessons.

The Disease Model interactive represents the spread of a disease in a population. It is meant to illustrate the various factors that can affect how quickly and how far a disease can spread. People that are colored green are healthy, ones that are infected are red, and ones that are immune are represented in blue. Doctors (in white of course!) come along to vaccinate people in the model, and changing the status of those they are in contact. The model is very interesting to watch and offers opportunities for writing and reflection to describe what is happening while it is running.

Changing various factors in the model also changes the outcomes of spread, just as they do in real life and this model tries to represent some of those outcomes and what we can learn by running numerous trials.

When you use this interactive, you can set up various parameters that are excellent for guided inquiry exercises. You could ask questions based on running several trials of the model. Here are a few from the Instructor materials that go with the model:

How does population density affect the spread of a disease?

Activity: Set the initial population to 2000 people. Run the model a few times. Record the number of people who are recovered and the number of people who died when the infection stops spreading.

Why is an epidemic especially dangerous in a crowded city like New York?

Activity: Try again with about 1500, 1000, and 500 people. Record the number of people who are recovered and the number of people who died when the infection stops spreading. Density as a factor. A disease can spread more quickly the denser a population is.

How does a quarantine help to stop the spread of an infection?

When is it appropriate to enforce a quarantine?

Try it out, or comment on other ways you could use this model in your teaching!