Sick Meier's Covid-19

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  Game beginning

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  Further spread

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  As the disease spreads

Inspiration

We were inspired by our individual accounts of Covid-19 as it has created a major imprint in our lives and is very relevant currently. While we were each impacted differently, we found a common understanding that there could be better allocation of resources which was evident from the plethora of news articles criticizing our government and the lack of resources in the strategic national stockpile. To this we asked: how could we take this issue and connect it with technology in a way that is impactful? That was when we thought of a game/stimulation that was user friendly that would serve as a learning model to better prepare administration for epidemics.

What it does

In order to increase public knowledge and awareness for how diseases like Covid-19 spread, we created Sick Meier’s Covid-19, a strategy-based video game to simulate pandemics. In this game, players will attempt to allocate resources to different states in order to manage the spread of the disease as effectively as possible. Each month, the game prints out various statistics about how much the disease has spread.

How we built it

This game was created with a Graphical User Interface of the United States that allows users to interact with individual states. The initial conditions match with the numbers of infected patients by state as of the end of March, 2020. The game simulates how various factors such as interstate travel and vacations vastly increase the rate at which the disease spreads.

Challenges we ran into

Ironically, our biggest issue was managing our own resources. We had a very limited amount of time and a seemingly unlimited amount of ideas of features we wanted to implement. We had to balance our desires to make the simulation as realistic as possible with the understanding that we could only implement a finite amount of features.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of the accuracy of the simulation we created in modeling diseases as well as the creative idea that we created in bringing awareness to Covid-19.

What we learned

We learned that the statistics behind how diseases spread is much more complicated than we had originally anticipated. Diseases cannot be fully modeled with simple algorithms. Instead, they require complex and detailed models to show their spread.

What's next for Sick Meier's Covid-19

We want to add functionality for users to spend the money they accumulate on fighting the disease. Additionally, we plan on adding in a system for the player to quarantine and lock down specific states to better fight the disease.

Built With

• css
• html
• javascript