Simulating the Bug
Screenshot showing who was infected.Copyright 2012 Douglas Bartelsen, University of Nebraska
Students modify a provided App Inventor code to design their own diseases. This serves as the evolution step in the software/systems design process. The activity is essentially a mini design cycle in which students are challenged to design a solution to the modification, implement and test it using different population patterns The result of this process is an evolution of the original app.
Engineers follow a design process to solve problems. The software/systems engineering design process includes the steps of analysis, design, implementation, testing and evolution. This activity focuses on the evolution step, which is often overlooked by practitioners.
Epidemiologists track the spread of diseases using data from doctors, hospitals and other sources. With enough data, they can develop models that predict the speed and breadth of an epidemic. With these models in hand, software engineers create programs to display and analyze current and past data. Software engineers collaborate with epidemiologists to improve or adjust the models as necessary, as new data suggest changes. These models enable public health officials to track infections and more importantly, attempt to prevent or reduce the impact of diseases on individuals.
After this activity, students should be able to:
- Follow the design process to modify an App Inventor app.
- Analyze data collected by an Android app manually or by developing an algorithm, and identify how this analysis compares to the same data analyzed by the application.