The students in the workshop today covered a very important scenario in class. That scenario was the SIR, or Susceptible-Infected-Recovered. The class began with a quick mentally invigorating exercise. The students had to line up against the wall according to their birth month. The trick was that they could not talk to each other. They managed it in a relatively small amount of time.
The students then got to work with the Disease Epidemic Model in NetLogo and experiment with all different forms of variables that affect a form of sickness. After they worked with the applet on the computer, they got to act it out in class. They used dice in cups to create the chances of infection and recovery that were present in the NetLogo applet. After the activity, they graphed the results and compared them to the results in the NetLogo applet.
The final lesson of the day was modeling the same SIR scenario in Vensim. The concepts of the model were displayed on the board on class before any modeling work was done. The model was very basic, using simple populations of healthy and sick people, and converted the healthy into sick with a single equation. After creating the model itself they then graphed it with a tool in the program.