Doctoral candidate Zach Ward volunteers with Harvard’s Project Teach to teach middle school students about infectious disease modeling. Project Teach helps students develop a college-going identity by demonstrating that college can be affordable, accessible, and attainable. Students in Zach’s classes learn about why models are built and how researchers use math to model diseases. His classes simulate a ‘zombie epidemic’ using an interactive computer model of the classroom. Students decide how best to arrange their seating plan and how to allocate limited resources (zombie vaccines) to their classmates in order to minimize the expected number of infections.
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