Simpocalypse for Middle School: Science

In this project, you'll be researching infectious diseases, and using what you learn along with your imagination and creativity to invent your own imaginary disease in Simpocalypse. You'll use your disease model to propose and test mitigation strategies, present your work to the rest of your class, and then finally pick one group's disease and societal response to refine and improve. You'll need to put together concepts from a lot of different subjects: biology, engineering, computer science, creative and technical writing, and more. Let's get started.

The Standards

This project is designed to meet Michigan's MS-ETS1-1, MS-ETS1-2, MS-ETS1-3, and MS-ETS1-4 science standards, Michigan's CTE ST 2.2 standard, and several of the ELA Core Standards in science and technical subjects. It also meets many of the ISTE's Student standards. 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

You'll have a lot to do in the next four weeks. Not only do you need to learn how to use Simpocalypse, but you'll also have to do your research, use your creativity to write a good story of your disease, and create a Simpocalypse model you can use to support your proposals for disease mitigation.

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 necessarily going doing lots of fancy statistical analysis, like the high school statistics students would, 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 that, 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.
• Next, you'll go out and learn about infectious disease outbreaks from the past. The Simpocalypse website has some information to get you started, but you'll need to do some digging on your own, too.
• Once you think you understand enough background information, your group will create the story of a completely made-up disease. You'll describe the disease, explain how it's spread, and imagine its effects on society. How you'll do this is up to you; we suggest doing things like writing mock newspaper stories, or recording mock TV newscasts.
• Now your team has to do the hard work of creating your new made-up disease in Simpocalypse. You'll have to play around for a while, using trial and error to get the disease to behave how you want.
• Next you'll think of ways to control your new disease, by manipulating the Societal Measures settings in Simpocalypse to create your fictional people's response to your disease.
• When you think you have a good plan for the Simpocalypse people to control your disease, you'll present it to the rest of your class. (Obviously, you might need to do this over videoconferencing, or through some other virtual method.
• Your whole class will now pretend to be a public health authority. You'll pick one disease from all of the presentations and work together to improve the response plan. Once you've come to a conclusion you can all generally agree on, you'll finish your project by presenting your new and improved plan to the STEM Explorer team. (This will probably have to happen over videoconferencing too, or through a recorded video.)