As the latest wave of Covid surges around the globe, we wanted to update our most relevant Gizmo, Disease Spread. The Gizmo has been reformatted to be more user-friendly, the setting has been changed to students in a school, and there is now a mask option to see how masks can slow the spread. Users can now directly control the exact probability of transmission (without masks) and see how the factors of crowding, disease contagiousness, and masking can affect how quickly the disease spreads through the population.
While making these changes, we also removed one of the disease types, the “airborne” transmission. In the original Gizmo, this referred to a disease like Legionnaire’s Disease that could spread through air ducts in a ventilation system. However, that type of disease is very rare and in general usage “aireborne transmission” is a form of person-to-person transmission. So now we just have the person-to-person and foodborne disease types.
We have also modified the Student Exploration Sheet and Assessment Questions to reflect the changes to the Gizmo, so please be aware that some of the questions and answers may have changed. Even though the subject of disease spread is never a cheerful topic, we hope you enjoy the updated Gizmo.