Can good friends make me sick?
This question drives the inquiry for the Communicable Diseases unit, in which students investigate the biology of disease and how their bodies fight different diseases. Because the unit relates to people's health, students also begin to ask questions about how their actions may directly affect their own health.
| The driving question in this unit is broken down into three related sub-questions:  | Is someone sick? | | What makes me sick? | | How do I protect myself from getting sick? |
| To explore these questions, students use Artemis to search a selection of age-appropriate sites for information on bacteria, viruses, fungi, or parasites and sexually transmitted diseases (STDs). Each student chooses a disease he or she would like to study to determine what causes it and how it is spread. Students plan investigations, create models, make observations, and draw conclusions about how their particular disease functions. Throughout the unit, students relate their findings to their own experiences with illnesses. A discussion of STDs is also included in the curriculum. | The curriculum makes use of three key pieces of technology. Artemis helps students keep track of questions, organize information, and save search results. Thinking Tags are wearable minicomputers that simulate the spread of a virus. Developed at the MIT Media Lab, the index-card-sized devices help students collect data on how disease propagates through a population. In one activity, students are randomly assigned “sick” computers, “well” computers, and “carrier” computers. During normal classroom activities the Thinking Tags keep track of how a sickness might spread through the students’ contact with one another.
The unit also incorporates the dynamic modeling software Model-It, so students can demonstrate their hypotheses about how diseases spread. Using Model-It, students represent a system like the body’s immune system or the propagation pattern of a communicable disease. The software enables them to define the relationships among the elements in such a system and show how the relationships change over time. | Home | Top of Page |
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