Vaccinating meaningfully
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Throughout history infectious diseases have caused millions of deaths. An apparently innocuous disease like the flu still claimed many victims in the twentieth century: more people died from the Spanish flu epidemic in 1918-1919 than had died in the First World War. Over the last months infectious diseases like meningitis (caused by meningococcus), measles and rubella have been in the news a lot. Usually vaccination (inoculation) is the most effective way to prevent an epidemic. When you are vaccinated, a strongly weakened form of the virus concerned is injected, which causes your body to start producing antibodies against this disease. When you next encounter the real, much stronger virus, you have become immune because of the antibodies you produced, and you can no longer get ill from it. A regularly occurring problem with vaccination is however that when there is an unexpected outbreak of a disease there are not always enough vaccine doses available to vaccinate the entire population. You must then consider which groups (and in what numbers) can best be vaccinated for the best (and safest) result. This Alympiad assignment involves making these choices, i.e. allocating the available vaccines. First we will explore how a flu epidemic can develop, then we will investigate how vaccinating only a part of the population can prevent an epidemic.
Materials
Dutch version
Background information:
Math A-lympiad
The Mathematics A-lympiad is a real-world-mathematics-problem-solving competition for teams of students forom uppe secondary schooles, with open ended assignments.
The open assignments are designed by the A-lympiad committee, a committee residing at the Freudenthal Institute of Utrecht University in the Netherlands, that organizes the Mathematics A-lympiad since 1989. The aim is to elicit students to think mathematically, to solve open-ended unfamiliar problems in a creative way, to model, structure and represent problems and solutions, to work collaboratively and to communicate about mathematics. The task is set in a non-mathematical real life (often work related) situation that asks for mathematical modelling and problem solving. The final product is a report fitting the real-life context of the task.
Math in teams
During the Dutch Mathematics Day Contest students work in teams of about 3 to 4 members on an open mathematical problem solving task during a couple of hours. The product of this work is a report (and sometimes a presentation).
Using your skills in a new setting
- The task gives the students the opportunity to show what they have learned from mathematics and how they can use the knowledge and skills in a new situation.
- Students can try, analyze, reason, calculate en design;
- The (context of the) task is authentic, while the mathematics knowledge is easy to (re)use in this new situation;
- Different teams can work 'on their own level' and this gives opportunities for differentiation;
- There is a structure in the task from 'easy first steps' to a more complex end task.
The assessment can be focused on:
- The completeness and correctness of the answers for the various parts;
- the representation of calculations and the method used;
- the use of math;
- the argumentation and the justifications of choices and decisions;
- the depth to which the various assignments have been answered;
- originality and creativity in methods and solutions;
- elements like: lay-out, readability, language, illustrations etc.
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