Content Objectives
This unit will introduce data science via vaccine technology, public health, and design thinking. Students will study the past while learning that good ideas must come from somewhere. They are slow ideas that are refined and altered over time before becoming successful. Students will also hone in on a present-day problem: vaccination rollout rates in our nation and the developing world. Students will have the opportunity to prototype their solutions for widespread vaccination while understanding that good ideas take experimentation and time. Students will get hands-on experience with data analysis, proportions and ratios, and the design thinking process.
Innovation
When I say 'innovator,' who immediately comes to mind? For me it’s the white men I hear about most commonly, Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Thomas Edison, etc. Some personal favorites in education I admire that also come to mind are Eli Luberoff, the founder of an online calculator Desmos, Sal Khan of Khan Academy, and Jo Boaler, a Stanford professor whose work has primarily focused on mathematics and mindset education in k12 schools born out of environments and their experiences in education.
All those people had some good idea that created a new piece of technology or practice that changed us for the better. What does it take to develop new technology or processes that could be useful to people? Thanks to my obsessions with cartoons as a kid, I have always envisioned some genius type of person with a mind like Einstein that has a literal lightbulb moment, and is then able to create a genius idea. Good ideas don't just come from Eureka moments or out of nowhere. According to Steven Johnson, good ideas come from our environments.4 They take time, long thought, collaboration, sometimes even centuries of ideas and technological advancements. Ideas come slowly.
As a learner, I often felt shame in how slowly it took to understand a mathematical idea. This shame grew from the evident impatience and frustration of my teachers. As a math teacher myself, I have also had moments of impatience and frustration with my students. This perpetuates the continuous cycle of teacher expecting learners to grasp concepts immediately, and the learners inevitably failing to live up to those expectations.
This mindset needs to change first for me as a teacher, before the mindset can then be passed down to my students. When I think of how this perseverance can benefit myself and my students, it feels imperative to carry this thinking into every piece of instruction I give in my classroom.
The evolution of vaccine technology is an excellent example of 'the slow hunch', and how good ideas evolve over time. The idea has been around for centuries, and new ideas have slowly evolved into new technology that could one day keep up with global pandemics or eradicate older diseases that still plague the globe today.
Vaccine Introduction
Life expectancy is a statistical measurement of the average lifespan a cohort could expect to live. Factors such as race, income, gender, and geography each influence life expectancy. We can assess a population's health and tell a larger story with this measurement. We are getting older! Not in the sense that my 30th birthday is around the corner, but global life expectancy has doubled since the 1900s.5 From 1900 to 2010, the United States life expectancy increased from 48.3 to 78.7.6 While all global life expectancies since the 1900s have risen above 50 years, gaps and divides exist between countries, races, and gender.
Figure 1: Graph depicting how life expectancy has changed.7
Why are people getting older? What will this mean for our society in the future? What factors may have contributed to differences in lifespans between populations? Technological advances in public health are one answer to some of these questions.
Significant advancements towards improving disease control, sanitation, and clean water contributed to the largest life expectancy gain from 1880 to 1920.8 One might think that medical advancements such as surgical techniques and medical treatments would have made the most significant change. However, simply improving conditions and taking steps towards prevention and control of diseases paved the way for our global trend up.9
Most notably, vaccines' advancement and widespread use in the 1900s10 have greatly improved public health by eradicating diseases that once plagued the globe for centuries.
History of Vaccines
Until recently, millennials and later generations of wealthier nations have not had to contend much with the threat of fatal viruses. Due to the development of vaccines, diseases such as polio and smallpox do not plague our minds when we step out for the day. Who do we have to thank for the eradication of these diseases?
Though the history of vaccines is thought to have begun with Edward Jenner, it is more accurate to state that the concept of vaccination came from a collection of ideas long before his time. These ideas continued after Jenner; vaccines have been engineered throughout eras of discoveries and innovators.11
Due to the expansion of civilization and later colonialism, smallpox was once a global threat. After its centuries-long reign, this highly contagious and deadly disease was officially declared eradicated in 1980 by the World Health Assembly. The origin of smallpox is unknown, its existence dates back at least 3000 years with the discovery of rashes on Egyptian mummies.12
As smallpox was ravaging communities for many centuries, early thinkers were coming up with methods of combating the disease.
Enter Edward Jenner, whose work we attribute to being the foundation of vaccination and later influenced later inoculations of other diseases. Jenner's work was influenced by the idea of variolation, a process of exposing yourself to the disease through scratching a dried smallpox scab or puss into your arm or inhaling it. The earliest evidence of variolation comes from Africa, China, and India13 hundreds of years before Edward Jenner.
Smallpox is the only disease thus far to be eradicated, thanks to vaccination efforts.14 Because smallpox has been eliminated, we no longer vaccinate populations for it. The smallpox vaccination is where the words 'vaccine' and 'vaccination' derive from because of the cowpox virus, vaccinia, that was extracted for immunization.15 Smallpox vaccine is a live attenuated vaccine because it comes from a weaker but similar cowpox virus that was not harmful to humans.16
How Vaccines Work
Vaccinations, or at least the concept of vaccines, have been common practice for centuries. Technology has improved the way vaccines are delivered and how they work. In more recent times new technological advances, such as mRNA vaccines, are changing the way vaccines are created entirely.
Understanding how vaccines work starts with understanding how your immune system works when faced with the threat of germs. Your immune system's job is to protect your body from invaders such as germs and viruses when they enter. When your immune system is weak or meets a foe it has not encountered before, you become sick. How your body reacts to the threat is what vaccines replicate without causing you harm. Your immune system activates when antigens (the foreign invader) enter your body and finds their way to a cell whose job is to find the antigen and gather information from the virus. Once it does, your immune system learns how to fight the invader better the next time it is faced with the same virus again.17
Vaccines work by fooling your immune system into thinking it's the actual disease, without being as harmful, causing your system to start up its defense mechanism and learn. There are different types of vaccines that work to trigger this response.
Vaccines come in different types: live-attenuated, inactivated vaccines, subunit, viral vector, and messenger RNA (mRNA), see figure 2.
Figure 2: Table Depicting Vaccines by Type.
Measles
Measles, one of the most contagious diseases, was nearly eliminated in the United States but has reemerged in unvaccinated populations. Refusal of the Measles Mumps and Rubella MMR vaccine and anti-vaccination movements of the 1990s illustrate just how infectious misinformation could be.18
The Wakefield Epidemic
The epidemic of the anti-vaccination movement was primarily fueled by Andrew Wakefield's study on Measles Mumps and Rubella published in the Lancet in 1998.This study was retracted in 2010, and Wakefield's license has since been stripped. This study claimed that MMR caused autism in children and is an excellent example of how sample size matters when conveying information. As a result, the UK's vaccination rates of MMR took two decades to recover; more than 12,000 cases of measles resulted in hospitalizations, serious complications, and at least three deaths.19
Culture: Public Perception of Vaccines
Because technology has changed the speed and access to communication, misinformation is able to spread faster than ever before. Anyone can post their thoughts on the internet, and it can catch on as quickly as the spread of diseases. Therefore, data literacy has become a vital skill. We must now read the flood of data and statistics, and navigate through the misinformation to find the facts. Critical thinking and discerning of misinformation could be life-saving measures with which we could potentially arm future generations.
COVID-19 And mRNA
Messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccines, a brand new approach to vaccines, are changing the speed at which we create vaccines. Unlike previous vaccines, mRNA uses no form (weakened or killed) or piece of the organism.20 These vaccines work by delivering a message to our cells to build spike proteins and trigger our immune response.21 Because these vaccines don't use a virus, they can be created and modified rapidly. Most notably, although studies have been ongoing for decades for different viruses like the flu and Zika, mRNA has got its time at-bat in the wake of the pandemic to prevent COVID-19.
Herd Immunity
A critical part of the eradication of a disease is herd immunity. Herd immunity slows down the spread through communities22, but it depends on people in the communities being vaccinated. If individuals choose not to vaccinate, as in the case of the measles outbreak following the Wakefield study, then herd immunity can not play its role in eradicating a disease
Data
Much of our life is defined by data. We live in a world where everything is tracked. Data explains how Spotify keeps suggesting incredible headbangers because it knows me. Or why it's hard to stop scrolling Tiktok because every video is so relatable. It also helps us keep track of more important matters, such as the state of our world, economy, and health. Yet, our education system isn't doing much to prepare students for this data-filled world.23 We explain to students that they need to know math to succeed in the real world, but outdated math curriculums do not prepare students for contemporary problems. By not helping students to become more data literate, we are potentially leaving them vulnerable to being misled by data.24
Further, the public's response to the pandemic has made it very clear that my responsibility as a math educator is to build my students' data science and data analysis skills. For this reason, this unit will allow students to practice looking at graphs and other data representations while asking questions that help build a story and literacy for the information they are interpreting.
Sample Size
The sample size is a statistical term that refers to the study of a representative smaller number of a larger population. Selection of your sample size in a study is essential because you are finding a representation of a total population. The larger the sample size, the more accurate your findings may be. In Wakefield's case, he studied only 12 children25 and is a great discussion piece on how data could be swayed. Students should discuss why data literacy is essential when misinformation is a matter of life and death.
Epidemiology
Epidemiology is the study of quantitative data and public health; epidemiologists can hypothesize health outcomes and diseases in populations by analyzing patterns. Essentially, epidemiologists study the data of public health in order to better understand outcomes and decide appropriate actions and responses.26
Prevalence and Incidence
These two numbers can tell a story across history. Prevalence and incidence are specific population proportional measurements of a particular time or period for a disease. The differences between these epidemiological evaluations are that prevalence is the number of disease cases, and the incidence is the rate of new cases.27
Design Thinking
The design thinking process is an approach to innovating technology and systems with the user at the center, a human-centered approach. This framework is nothing new to the tech or business world, but it is catching on faster in higher education and k12 schools. Some schools, such as the North Phillips School of Innovation in North Carolina, are even letting their students design their school entirely from the ground up; from their physical classroom space to learning standards through passion projects.28 Criticism for design thinking in schools is that many of the tenants of the design thinking process are approaches and activities that teachers are already doing. Empathy, the first step in design thinking, is what those who lead design thinking workshops need work through with teachers. Empathizing with teachers could help better understand us and speak our language to implement design thinking practices accross all contents, including those that are not traditionally STEM.29 Now that I have had a couple of years of slowly thinking about the process since the first workshop I sat in as a teacher, I see design thinking in almost everything I do as a teacher. Design thinking is just a different approach to thinking and problem-solving; it's putting students at the center of my lessons when planning.
The design thinking process consists of 5 phases including, empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test. In the first phase, designers begin to empathize with their users through observations and interviews. In the second phase, you start to put the information you've gathered in the first phase to define your problem (analysis and synthesis) and create a problem statement. The third ideation phase is where you start to generate ideas from what you have gathered in the first phases. Finally, you move into the final stages of making quick, inexpensive prototypes and then test those designs. Most importantly, design thinking is not a linear process; but instead, you can work on multiple phases simultaneously and repeat phases as many times as needed.
This is where we land back on how teaching design thinking can be challenging. It is not a linear curriculum but a framework or approach30 to problem-solving. It does not have to be a lengthy project; in fact, many teachers ask students to emphasize and define problems through existing practices. In design thinking the user is at the center, in a school setting this means our students are being centered in everything we do.
The Speed of Innovation
Mathematics enables us to reason and explain how things work for just about anything, including the rate at which technology grows. Millennials, in my best opinion, have had the best seat in which to observe this change. Our world started with few technological devices, but everything has changed so quickly. Our families were excited to bring home those massive computer boxes home, the ones that slowly connected us to the web and took up the phone connection. Now we can instantaneously stream movies from the phones in our hand. We listened to Walkman, which was quickly replaced for an iPod, which quickly turned into having all those devices in one place: our smartphones. Technological progress can be explained by more math because it exponentially increases.31
There is much hesitancy towards the COVID-19 vaccine due to the perception of how quickly it was developed. However, our knowledge and new technology have contributed to the rapid development of a new vaccine.32
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