Infected! A Spread of Disease Experiment

In this lesson plan, I have outlined an easy experiment using basic kitchen chemistry. Students are given a sample of flour to exchange with three partners throughout the classroom. Two samples contain an infection from the start (baking powder), but the students don’t know who is originally infected. At the end of the Sharing Phase, students enter the Testing Phase by adding vinegar to their sample. If it bubbles, they are infected! Along the way, they will make predictions about how many will become infected and ultimately try to determine who was patient zero. Tie this lesson in to real-world examples of disease spread.

Want to turn this activity into a computer science activity? Imagine that instead of person-to-person contact, this is computer-to-computer contact and the disease spread is malware or a computer virus!