The Outbreak

See what your students get, and why it lands.

No mockups. Every page below is real, pulled straight from the files you download. Tap any one to see it full size.

A worksheet was never going to teach this.

Your students do not answer questions about epidemics. They run one. On this case day the Kellam County task force sees the morning briefing for a county of 185,000 people: rising case counts, a pathogen that is not yet confirmed, and a budget that will not cover everything. They have to choose an intervention tier and commit to it. The data is asymmetric and incomplete. The Epidemiologist sees one cluster, the Communications Officer sees a buried parent thread, and no single role can see the whole picture alone. Each student weighs leading indicators against lagging ones, names the falsification conditions that would force a change, and makes a real call from evidence rather than from a feeling of being decisive.

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They are graded on the path, not the outcome.

A sound decision that meets an unlucky simulated result still earns full marks. A lucky guess behind thin reasoning does not. The dual rubric uses a clear 5/3/1/0 scale and scores what students can defend: did they read the evidence by tier, did they separate signal from noise, did they name the conditions that would have falsified their plan. The Hybrid-100 model keeps your grading workload manageable while holding the bar high. It rewards the team that held the boring, defensible Tier 2 choice through the intervention lag over the team that panicked and stacked new measures every time the count rose. Your students learn that disciplined reasoning is the thing being measured, so that is where their energy goes.

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Let the workbook hold the busywork.

The tech-enabled workbook does the arithmetic so your students do the thinking. It tracks daily case counts, the reproduction number Rt, the running budget, and the intervention tier the team has bound itself to. When students request the $15,000 supply-chain investigation or apply the $4,200 refrigeration fix at Valley Fresh, the sheet shows the consequences and the $3,800 per day it saves. The reasoning log lives right beside the numbers, so every decision is captured with the evidence behind it. There is no manual tallying, no lost figures, no time bled into formatting. Students spend their energy distinguishing leading indicators from lagging ones and synthesizing clues across roles, which is exactly the judgment the simulation is built to grow.

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Every day is already scripted.

You bring the facilitation. The simulation brings everything else. The teacher guide is a word-for-word run-doc for every day-slot, so you can open it cold and lead with confidence. It tells you the decision pressure students face that day, the diagnostic signals to watch for, and the biases likely to surface. You learn to spot the teams writing await identification in their logs versus those standing up surveillance, and the teams panicking at the lag versus those checking their falsification conditions. The guide is day-indexed rather than clock-indexed, so you can compress or extend it to fit your calendar. Prep is light because the careful work is already done. Your job is to read the room and ask the next good question.

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The lesson plan is already written.

Every simulation comes with a fully editable, admin-ready lesson plan. Standards alignment, daily pacing, learning objectives, differentiation, and an assessment plan are already done, so you can hand it to an administrator or adapt it to your district template in minutes.

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The day the rising numbers stopped meaning failure.

On Day 6, Maya's team had committed to Tier 2, the broad and defensible plan, and the morning briefing punished them for it. Case counts climbed. They climbed again on Day 7. The team that had panicked next door stacked three new interventions and burned half their budget. Maya felt the same pull. Every instinct told her the rising count was proof her plan had failed, that decisive action meant doing more, doing it now, doing something. Her favored read of the situation, that the curve should bend the moment they acted, sat right in front of her and would not hold.

At the pivot she had a choice: protect the theory that action produces immediate results, or trust the evidence. She went back to the workbook and looked at Rt, the leading indicator, which had already turned down even as the case counts, the lagging indicator, kept rising. The 72-hour lag was doing exactly what the data predicted. She held Tier 2 steady. By Day 9 the curve bent. What she saw then was that holding a sound decision through the noise is harder, and more important, than the thrill of acting.

An outbreak in Kellam County, and your students are the task force.

Kellam County has 185,000 residents and a spreading illness with no confirmed pathogen. Your students take roles on the public health task force, including the Epidemiologist, the Communications Officer, and others who each hold a slice of the picture. Over 15 days they manage surveillance, choose intervention tiers, control a budget, and answer to a frightened public. The data is asymmetric, contradictory, and incomplete, and the decision cannot wait. They are responsible for the safety of the county.

Engineering better thinkers.

In an outbreak the data is incomplete and the clock is running, so discernment is the whole job. Each day pairs a named bias with the capacity that defeats it, turning the friction of a hard call into a durable habit of mind your students can name and reuse.

15 days of evidence under pressure.

The opening days stand up the task force, the roles, and the surveillance habits students will lean on. From there the case moves through three stages: activating without a confirmed pathogen, binding to an intervention tier and holding it through the lag, then synthesizing clues across roles to find the hidden vector and set exit criteria.

Standards alignment.

The Outbreak is built on the NGSS high school life science standards. Students engage HS-LS2-2 and HS-LS2-6 as they reason about population dynamics, carrying capacity, and how a disturbance like an outbreak moves through a community. They use mathematical and computational thinking with Rt and case-count data to support claims, hitting science and engineering practices for analyzing and interpreting data and for constructing evidence-based arguments. The crosscutting concepts of stability and change and of cause and effect run through every decision. The work is honest biology: students model transmission, distinguish leading from lagging indicators, and defend conclusions from incomplete evidence.

Turnkey, classroom-ready.