Today will be an opportunity for the students to explore the internet and ways in which expected value can be used to track epidemics (in very simplified forms). These web-pages provide both empirical and analytical solutions to the "Hermit Problem (Using Statistics by Travers, Stout, Swift, and Sextro -- p67)." However, the more the students can come up with on their own or as a class, the more effective this lesson will be.
There is a Macintosh program that can be downloaded from the "Model" page and it should provide some insight into the problem and challenge the students to solve variations of this same problem. If you don't have a Macintosh, however, you will be unable to run this program.
If these lessons are being taught to earlier grades, the analytical solutions may be bypassed and the focus may be placed upon the modeling. These lessons may, of course, be stretched over many days, as best fits the class.
If you like, you may return to the introduction page.