Dengue is a mosquito-borne disease caused by virus and found mostly in urban and semi-urban areas, in many regions of the world. Female Aedes mosquitoes, which usually bite during daytime, spread the disease. This flu-like disease may progress to severe dengue and cause fatality. A generic reaction-diffusion model for transmission of mosquito-borne diseases was proposed and formulated. The motivation is to explore the ability of the generic model to reproduce observed dengue cases in Borneo, Malaysia. Dengue prevalence in four districts in Borneo namely Kuching, Sibu, Bintulu and Miri are compared with simulations results obtained from the temporal and spatio-temporal generic model respectively. Random diffusion of human and mosquito populations are taken into account in the spatio-temporal model. It is found that temporal simulations closely resemble the general behavior of actual prevalence in the three locations except for Bintulu. The recovery rate in Bintulu district is found to be the lowest among the districts, suggesting a different dengue serotype may be present. From observation, the temporal generic model underestimates the recovery rate in comparison to the spatio-temporal generic model.
In the revised curriculum 2017, computational thinking skills have been
integrated into the curriculum contents of all existing subjects in primary and
secondary schools in Malaysia. The newly revised curriculum calls for an
urgent need to prepare teachers to deliver computational thinking skills in
the classroom and assess the teaching and learning outcomes of
computational thinking skills. This paper reports the development of an
assessment rubric, myCTRubric, designed to evaluate the teaching and
learning outcomes of the newly integrated computational thinking skills
among primary school students in Malaysia. An action research approach
guided the design and development of myCTRubric. myCTRubric was
reviewed and validated by a panel of computational thinking subject matter
experts. Analyses of results show that myCTRubric is reliable and has strong
content validity. This pioneering work is expected to lend insights into the
teaching and learning practices of computational thinking in Malaysian
classrooms and served as a practical guideline for future research.