Published: August 4, 2025
Mr. Urbanowksi writes:
Encouraged by NITARP experience with data & spreadsheets, and intrigued by press coverage of COVID in the early days of the pandemic, I totally ran down the Googlesheets rabbit hole with some of my students to learn enough new functions to build a graphical simulation of the spread of an infectious disease.
Even better, thanks to my NITARP encounter with scholarship, I felt empowered to write an article about it which was published in the journal of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM). Pandemic Outbreak Modeling with a Spreadsheet can be found here: https://pubs.nctm.org/view/journals/mtlt/115/7/article-p490.xml It might be behind a paywall; feel free to reach out to me if you're interested and I'll send you a PDF.
But even better still, thanks to my NITARP encounter with the Astronomy community, I learned that scientists are generally enthusiastic about sharing their work and wisdom. This gave me the courage to reach out directly to the high-profile epidemiologist who had been quoted in the New York Times article that inspired my project in the first place. He cheerfully gave permission to use the epi curves he'd created.
I realize this isn't a story about teaching astronomy, but I hope it is of interest in the sense that NITARP truly expands horizons for teachers and students across the board.