By Ben Drucker (me), Christian Galo '22, Hyeyun Chae '21, and Mari Quiroz '23 (Swarthmore College Group)
You can find the link to this project's website here.
You can find the presentation poster inside the git repository as poster.pdf.
You can find a demo video of Mask-It or Casket here.
The recent outbreak of COVID-19 caused a global pandemic. In addition to the disease itself, the world had to contend with social problems it brought to the surface. Many were caused by misunderstandings about the source of the disease, who the disease affects, and diseases in general.
COVID-19 is an example of a zoonotic disease, “an infectious disease caused by a pathogen that jumped from an animal to a human.” In the case of COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2 from bats in Wuhan City, China transmitted to humans in a live animal market. Despite the amount of anxiety, fear, and panic COVID-19 caused, it is not the first pandemic or respiratory disease we have experienced, nor the first coronavirus to be present. Instead of taking precautions, the lack of knowledge in diseases in combination with misinformation from social media caused people to jump to conclusions and ultimately lead to social problems such as xenophobia, hate crimes, ignoring science. This hindered the process of policymaking and the effectiveness of policies.
To raise awareness of the diversity of approaches in dealing with health crises across the globe—which partially stem from different availabilities of resources, levels of healthcare system implementations, and demographic makeups—the user can make countless (yet limited by time and budget) combinations of policy decisions to keep their city under control.
COVID-19 will not likely be the last pandemic humans will encounter. For society to better combat the next pandemic, we allow users to experience a pandemic from a different perspective. Once the user starts the game, they will be brought to an interactive time-based game environment. The objective of the game is to keep the disease at a low-risk level and reduce the number of fatalities promptly. We will demonstrate the ease through which disease spreads using simulated interpersonal interactions. We hope users will better conceptualize disease spread and the factors considered when making and implementing policies during pandemics. Through a more interactive, appealing, and engaging medium than non-interactive ones, we attempt to draw users who normally wouldn't enjoy learning about disease spread.
For best results, use Chrome, Opera, or Safari. (Edge has not been tested)
In Firefox, for best results (to enable one visual effect), type about:config in the search bar. Then click the "Accept Risk and Continue" if you choose to do so. In the search bar on this preferences page, type layout.css.backdrop-filter.enabled. On the right hand side next to this option, click the double harpoon icon (
) to switch this option to "true." Then you may procceed to the website. This only needs to be done once for each device.
Below you will find an image representing the rough idea behind our social network graph. There are different groups with many connections in each group with a smaller number of connections between groups.
