How not To Become A Global Pandemic StatisticTeam: 15 School: Aspen Elementary Area of Science: epidemeology
Interim: Problem Definition:According to the Los Alamos Monitor, the Friday of the first week of school there were 39 absences. Five days later 136 kids were absent from the Middle School, which was the peak in the number of absences. Six days later only 22 students were absent. It is thought that most of the absences were because of the H1N1 flu. We will be using Star Logo TNG to model the spread of influenza in the Los Alamos school district.
Problem Solution: We have surveyed the students in our elementary school to determine the type and number of good and bad behaviors we can include in our model. We will also model the severity of illness to determine the possible impact on our local hospital, the Los Alamos Medical Center. We just sent out a survey a month or two ago. We just got all the results back. We are working on graphing them. This is a critical part of our project because, the Star-logo space-land part is where we are going to try and program the agents to act like students of Aspen Elementary School. Some of the questions we asked the students were Do You Wash Your Hands Before Meals?, How Many Times A Day Do You Wash Your Hands?, Do you Have Asthma Or Any other Type of Respiratory Condition? We are not sure that every body answered the questions truthfully so we are going to graph the results and use what the majority of the school answered. We will be using Star Logo TNG to model the spread of influenza in the Los Alamos school district. The diagram of the problem will include modeling behaviors of students, their mobility activities, and determine the impacts on the disease spread. An example of what we would like to model is the surprising number of kids that got sick at the Los Alamos Middle School in August 2009.
Progress To Date: Each student has been working on different parts of the StarLogo model. The idea is that we will model these individually, understand the effects, and combine these into one model with complex behaviors and interactions. One part of the project that we are working on is to show agents that get the disease by changing their color. The idea that we have is to have agents that have never had the disease in the color green. If they get exposed (by collision with a sick agent) the would turn orange. Some of the orange agents would get sick and we would show this in red. Most would then recover and now be immune and they would be blue. Some sick agents would die and they would be black. For agents we created people and “houses.” These houses could be homes or classrooms for students. There are people assigned to each house. Each house is at an x and y location. In the Star-logo space-land. Each agent will move forward and might change directions with each step. We used a clock to time the seconds for them to move around. We would move them to their house by moving each person to the x and y location of their house. As a simple example, at exactly ten seconds the people would go to each house. The agents will stay in their houses for another period of time. When a person leaves their house, they start randomly moving around again. We reset the clock to zero after the people leave their homes to start over again. We can change the length of time people stay in their house or are away from their house. We can also have people go to their houses at different times and have them stay at their houses different lengths of time.We will try to find a way to have the people get infected while they are at their house. We would like to add more people and houses.
Expected Results:We expect the results to come out where everybody is a little unhealthy but mostly get everything a growing kid needs.
Team Members: Claire DeCroix
Claire Ticknor
Pippa Chadwick
Evan Oro
Sponsoring Teacher: Zeynep Unal Mail the entire Team |
