HOT TOPIC ABSTRACT
School Name: CAPSHAW MIDDLE SCHOOL 
Area of Science: SOCIAL SCIENCE 
Project Title: Hot Topic
    If you were to walk into my school ten to fifteen minutes before the first bell, you'll see students clustered in small groups and chirping like birds. Middle school is a place where students meet other students from all over town. Most students want to know who is popular and who isn't. They discuss who is hot and who is not. They get their information mostly by word of mouth from person to person. Rumors spread when a person who knows the rumor tells one of their neighbors. In other words, how close one is to the rumor will determine how soon (and perhaps how often) a given individual will hear the rumor.

     The neighbors can be described as the one in the middle with the four adjacent people or the eight adjacent people around. At each time step, every person who knows the rumor randomly chooses a neighbor to tell the rumor to. The purpose of our project is to explore the dynamics of how rumors spread. We want to model the spread of rumors using StarLogo. This simulation will keep track of who knows the rumor, how many people know the rumor and how many "repeated telling" of the rumor happens. 


TEAM MEMBERS:

Melissa Ramirez
Cory Sims
Johanna Silver
Thomas Silver
Jessica Stultz

SPONSOR:	Makoena Simon, James Taylor