mcwg

Mathematics Consortium Working Group (MCWG) Covid-19 resources

This page has teaching resources related to the Covid-19 pandemic for college-level Mathematics courses.

These resources are copyrighted © 2020 Mathematics Consortium Working Group, Hughes Hallett et al. or ©John Wiley & Sons and are distributed freely to promote their use and collect feedback. Our ultimate goal is to create a collection of resources that will help students understand the relevance of mathematical ideas in college-level Mathematics courses in a context which is affecting their lives directly.

Contact us at mcwg.contact@gmail.com. We appreciate any feedback and would love to hear about your experiences using them.

Note: Several problems in this site will be available in Applied Calculus, 7th edition, Hughes Hallett et al., John Wiley & Sons, 2022.

Consortium members working on this project

Deborah Hughes Hallett
Enrique Acosta Jaramillo
Daniel Flath
Brigitte Lahme
Ayşe A. Şahin
Thomas Tucker
Aaron Wootton

Sample problems

More sample problems by course or topic (see Instructor Notes for solutions):

Complete sets of problems together with instructor notes

Note: The following links will only work if (1) you are logged into github with your browser (login here and return to this site), and (2) your github user has access to the MCWG’s github COVID19 repository. If you do not have access, you will get a 404 “file not found” error. Contact us at mcwg.contact@gmail.com to get access.

Spreadsheet data exploration projects

Understanding data smoothing using moving averages: Statement, data, and solutions(pdf and spreadsheet file).
Exploring 14-day new case accumulation as an approximation to active cases: Statement, data, and solutions(pdf and spreadsheet file).
Discovering Logistic growth in data from Taiwan: Statement, data, and solutions(pdf and spreadsheet file).
Discovering Gompertz growth in data from Italy: Statement, data, and solutions(pdf and spreadsheet file).

Getting data for your classes:

Raw data for countries and US states, together with their 7-day smoothing (see instructor documents) can be downloaded using a website that Isaac Flath built for the Consortium.

https://isaac-flath.shinyapps.io/coronavirus2/

These two sites simplify enormously the process of getting the Covid-19 outbreak data from Johns Hopkins University for a specific region of the world. In particular, they allow students to easily explore and download data.

Applets

Below are two samples. More applets are available in the Instructor notes.

Fitting a Logistic function to the Covid-19 outbreak in Iceland

Fitting a Gompertz function to the Covid-19 outbreak in Italy

Moving average for different periods

This may be a sensitive topic for your students

Talking about the Covid-19 pandemic in class must be done thoughtfully, as the pandemic has hurt millions of people, including possibly some of your students. We believe that if presented empathetically, Covid-19 data can provide an opportunity to energize students by working on problems that have real importance to them.

We believe it is important to be open with the students about the challenges in working with emotionally charged material. A class discussion or email leading to class agreement to proceed with the material can be helpful. Be explicit about the reasons for introducing Covid-19 materials (for example, that mathematics has provided insight used by policy-makers attempting to control the pandemic, and that it is important data to analyze because of its relevance to all of us). There may still be some students who are not ready to deal with Covid-19 data, and perhaps they can be given alternative ways to engage with the material.

Contact Us

Write to mcwg.contact@gmail.com. Please let us know how you found this site.