SORBET in SLS began with a practical classroom need: turn the activities in the SORBET SLS 2026 worksheet into a compact, touch-friendly simulation that students could explore directly.
The starting materials included the new worksheet and a small amount of older content from the previous interactive. The older material was useful as a reference, but the worksheet became the source of truth. The goal was not to create an AI agent. It was to build a focused biology simulation that models disease transmission clearly and supports classroom discussion.
From worksheet instructions to simulation rules
The central activity asks students to model a closed population using two dice. Each contact produces a dice sum. When that sum matches one or more selected contagious sums, infection can pass from an infected person to a susceptible person.
The interactive therefore needed to let students:
- set the population of the closed environment;
- begin with no contagious sums selected;
- select one contagious sum, such as 7, and observe infections;
- pause after every contact to inspect how transmission occurs; and
- select several contagious sums, such as 7 and 8, to model greater contagiousness.
The model is intentionally a susceptible-infected model with no recovery. Once infected, a person remains infected. This keeps the focus on probability, contact conditions and the effect of changing the number of contagious outcomes.
Making student progress visible
The five worksheet actions were converted into an on-screen activity checklist. As students complete each action themselves, the corresponding step receives a mark and a green tick. The simulation does not simply reveal every answer at once; progress is tied to actual interaction.
To preserve vertical space, the learning objectives and success criteria were moved into a compact information tooltip. This was especially important because the simulation is designed to sit inside an iframe in SLS or another learning page, where every pixel of height matters.
Designing for smartboards and IR touch
IR touch screens behave differently from a mouse or a modern phone. Controls need generous hit areas, stable layouts and clear selected states. The controls were therefore kept direct: population input, contagious-sum checkboxes, pause controls and clear simulation commands. Small visual indicators were reduced where they consumed space, while the actual touch targets remained usable.
Real-time teacher analytics
A collapsible Teacher Analytics panel records the exploration sequence in real time. Each entry includes relative time, the action taken and the resulting state. Different action types use Unicode symbols for quick scanning.
This log helps a teacher see more than the final infection count. It can reveal whether a student tested the baseline first, changed the probability systematically, used pause-on-contact to reason about transmission, or jumped between settings without comparing outcomes. The log can also be cleared for a fresh run.
Publishing the completed resource
The finished simulation was packaged as a standalone web resource, published in the Biology collection and added to the iwant2study.org catalogue. A downloadable ZIP is also available for reuse or offline hosting.
Try the simulation:
SORBET in SLS Disease Transmission Dice Simulation
Biology resource article:
SORBET in SLS 2026 Worksheet article
Download the ZIP:
Standalone simulation package
Reflection
The most useful part of this build was treating the worksheet as a sequence of observable student decisions rather than merely placing worksheet text beside an animation. Each instruction became a testable interaction, each interaction could produce evidence of progress, and the analytics preserved the path students took through the investigation.
The resource was made by lookang with inputs from sweeling, using Codex App using ChatGPT5.5 High.
More Biology resources:
Open Source Physics Singapore Biology interactives
iwant2study.org
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