COVID-19 FINAL PROJECT
MATH 9, FALL 2020
1. The broad goal: Working in a group of 1-3 students, investigate some aspect of Covid-19 using
Mathematica. Unlike for the worksheets, if you work in a group, the project is expected to be
more extensive.
2. Main deadlines related to the Covid-19 Project. (There may also be Worksheet or Video Quiz
deadlines announced on Canvas.)
a. (All times are in Pacific time.) Wednesday of Week 8 by 11:59pm. Complete the Covid-19
Project Planning Quiz. Each student should complete this quiz. This counts the same as a
typical Unit Quiz, and will be graded in the Unit Quiz category.
b. Friday of Week 9 by 4:00pm. Submit a draft of your project; one submission per group. This
is worth 20 points in the “Final Project” category.
c. Monday of Finals week (December 14th) by 11:59pm. Submit the final version of your
project; one submission per group. This is worth 75 points in the “Final Project” category.
d. Monday of Finals week (December 14th) by 11:59pm. Complete the Individual report as-
signment. Each student should submit this. This is worth 5 points in the “Final Project”
category.
3. Citations.
a. It is essential to cite the original source of any code, for example by including the url of the
website. If something substantial is included in the project without attribution, that would be
reported as an academic integrity violation.
b. If your project is inspired by something in particular, please also give credit to the original
source, even if that original source has nothing to do with Mathematica.
c. You can either make citations next to the relevant code, or you can have a specific section of
the code where you put all of the citations together.
4. Grading criteria.
a. There is no specific length requirement. As a rough estimate, you should spend approxi-
mately 20 productive hours per group member working on this project. The more comfortable
you are using Mathematica, the less time you should need to produce something interesting.
b. Is the notebook clear and well-organized? Use text cells to help us understand what you did.
c. Does the project use Mathematica in an essential way? You can tell us what difficulties you
had while working on this project, in text cells or comments, to help us understand how the
project evolved and where your time was spent.
d. Does the project include interesting figures or plots? (This is not a requirement, but I imagine
most projects will include figures or plots.)
e. Does the project include material that was not covered in Math 9? (That is not a requirement,
but learning some new feature in Mathematica that you find interesting and applying it in
your project, that would be a very good use of your time. If you use techniques we didn’t
cover in class, we will take that into account when assigning a project grade.)
f. Does the project clearly indicate where the data came from? (The file path on your computer
is not useful to us!) It is not a requirement to use data, but I expect most projects will use at
least one dataset downloaded from the internet.
g. If the project uses code from another source, were changes made to the source code that
indicate you understood some portions of the code? (Tell us directly what changes you made,
or what difficulties you had in working with the code. A lot of Mathematica code written by
experts can be very difficult to understand, so even understanding and adjusting a small piece
of code can be a significant accomplishment.)
5. Suggestions.
a. Choose a topic you’re interested in. Covid-19 has unfortunately become a dominant influence
on society, and this is your chance to spend three weeks analyzing some aspect of the situation
which you find compelling.
b. Keep your goals realistic. A prediction for the future shape of the pandemic is an okay project
idea, but in that case the selling-point of your project should be the method used to make the
predictions; that is more interesting to me than the predictions themselves.
c. Make sure that most of your time spent on the project is related to using Mathematica in
an interesting way. (For example, say your dataset is formatted wrong, and you have to go
through and delete some hyphen - from each cell. Doing that by hand would not be a good
use of your time and would not be factored into the project grade. On the other hand, if you
can remove those hyphens using string patterns in Mathematica, that would be a good use of
your time.)
d. Every 30 minutes spent on the project, stop and ask yourself what you’ve accomplished. Be
ready to give up on an idea if it’s proving to be too difficult. (For example, I recently had
an idea of analyzing data from Google Trends, but I couldn’t figure out how to access the
data, and I eventually just cut my losses and gave up.) It’s often more efficient to learn what’s
possible in Mathematica, and then build your idea around that, rather than to come up with
an idea and hope it’s possible in Mathematica.
e. Don’t worry too much about the precise look of the images you make. Getting the images to
look good is important, but getting them to look perfect is not so important.
f. It’s totally fine to have your project divided into somewhat unrelated sections. A course
project in a history class or a literature class might need to be one big coherent idea, but
that’s not at all necessary for this Covid-19 Mathematica project. For example, maybe you’ve
finished your main idea but think you need to add more (or are told to add more when you
submit the draft). Go ahead and add something completely different; just make sure it’s still
related to Covid-19 and Mathematica.
g. Please err on the side of referencing everything. You should reference both blocks of code
that you take from somewhere else, and you should also reference ideas for your analysis if
they come from a specific source.
6. Sample ideas.
a. Analyze some aspect of Covid-19 data. (I’m intentionally being extremely vague. Decide
for yourself what interests you. I’ve also intentionally never had us work with Covid-19 data
in the worksheets or videos. See the Covid-19 resources page on Canvas for many different
possible data sources, and of course you’re encouraged also to find your own.)
b. Check out different visualizations of Covid-19 data and then try to make your own. (If your
visualization is based on one that you saw online, that’s great, but be sure you give credit to
the original source.)
c. Analyze the historical performance of one or more Covid-19 projections.
d. Write a program to simulate how a disease spreads through a population over time.
e. Analyze a component of vaccine development.
f. Are masks effective?
g. Analyze Covid-19 discussion on social media.

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