VAX game
Play a video game to learn about viruses and epidemics
About the Activity
The activity can be helpful for discussing aspects of graph theory because diseases spread through people’s social networks (your friend gets sick, then you get sick then one of your family members get sick and so on). How many or how few friends or family members that you have affects how quickly an infection spreads in the population. An infection in the game is represented with a red dot.
WE DID NOT CREATE THIS ACTIVITY!!! It was originally created by a Ph.D. student named Ellsworth Campbell and other collaborators of Prof. Marcel Salathe. The creators of this activity this interactive study how diseases spread as a kind of mathematical problem (in other words they study a field called “epidemiology”).
They originally created this game in 2013 and it worked great for a while but by 2022, it had stopped working. Thankfully they released their source code on github. Individuals associated with STEMcoding were able to simplify the code and get it working again so that it no longer requires a server to run it. There are some minor formatting issues with our version of the code. If as a senior project someone wants to try to improve it, the source code of our simplified version is available here
Links to Activity
Note: these links point to the same activity. We are providing multiple links in case one of them is blocked by your school.