Teacher Guide

Program a Doctor

Objectives
- Introduce block programming mechanics and concepts by guided programming of
a doctor breed
- Discuss the costs and benefits of an intervention to respond to the spread of
disease

Materials
- StarLogo TNG files:
o ProgramADoctor.sltng
- Student Worksheets
o ProgramADoctorStudentActivitySheet.doc

Expected Student Background

- Went through Epidemic Unit 1
- Explored Spaceland and Runtime Space controls

Review (5 – 10 mins, off-computer)

1. Review the elements of an epidemic with students as well as the costs and
benefits of responding or preventing them.

Program a Doctor
1. Introduce students to main activity: guiding them to program a doctor. You may
want to guide them as they follow along on the computer or split the guided
programming between teacher demo and student programming.
2. Ask students what would doctors do in this simulation?
a. Give vaccinations
b. Provide medical treatment
3. Setup and Run current simulation. Ask students what they observe happening in
the world and in the line graph. Are turtles recovering and if so, do they think it’s
a long or short recovery time? Note that last time they controlled the recovery
time, but in this simulation its fixed to a certain amount of time.
4. Refer to the ProgramADoctorStudentActivitySheet-TeacherGuide.doc to run the
guided programming.

Wrap-up
1. Determine who had the best scores? How much money was spent?
2. How did vaccinating and medicating go? Did anyone vaccinate more than
medicate? Or vice versa? What were effective strategies to save the turtles?
3. Were your doctor agents enough to stop the disease from becoming epidemic?
What else could we have done?
4. How “real” is this simulation/game? What aspects of the simulation/game are
reflected in the real world?
5. How can we make this simulation more “real”? What are other ways can we
tweak this world so that it reflects the way diseases spread in the real world?

DRAFT
 Teacher Guide

6. What are other elements or dimensions could we add to our epidemic game?

DRAFT