Experiments
There are a variety of ways that you can use Give It A Shot to do your own experiments. You can also work in teams or groups to run similar simulations to find answers to the same questions. The questions we have here are just a starting point. We expect you and your teachers will have great ideas on how to use this tool. Any teachers interested in sharing their Give It A Shot lesson plans or experiment questions, please contact us through our Feedback Form.
Some comparisons you can start with as you begin to explore this simulator tool:
- Compare small, medium, and large cities with the same disease and precautions to see if they work equally well in different cities.
- Compare using natural herd immunity versus vaccinations with the same disease in the same city to see how many lives are saved.
- Compare differences in safety precautions (masking, distancing) within the same city (doesn't apply to Polio).
Use our data sheet to record results from your simulations.
PDF | Excel File | Google Sheet
Some questions you might ask are:
- How many lives could you save in a city similar to yours if you vaccinated versus relying on natural herd immunity?
- Does masking or social distancing have a greater effect on the number of infections, hospitalizations, and deaths?
- Which works faster to stop a pandemic, having everyone wear N95 masks correctly and distance fully, or vaccinating?
You can also integrate research online with some of your findings:
For example, for COVID-19, you can do research to learn:
- Is there a difference between the real world outcomes in your town or city and a simulation for a city of similar size?
- With the numbers of cases and deaths in the news for specific cities, do you think that the social groups or “COVID bubbles” that people have made during distancing have worked to slow the spread of the virus? What might they have been doing wrong?
- What is the cost of the differences in hospitalizations between vaccinated and unvaccinated populations?
- What’s the country with the highest daily vaccination rate and how do findings compare in a similarly sized city to the country with the lowest daily vaccination rate?
- Are there any new variants of COVID-19 (like the UK, Brazilian, or South African variant) that we cannot protect against with the available vaccines? Is there a simulation you could run to see what effect there might be if this variant were to spread? How best might we stop the spread of the variant(s)?
