In 2020, Year 12 students at John Curtin College of the Arts, were required to model COVID-19 data from five different countries in order to find correlations between daily infections and unemployment rates, in order to make future predictions. Work received from students demonstrated how the task successfully provided unique learning opportunities, which are otherwise not experienced in a classroom environment under the pressures of a curriculum that is highly exam-focused and based on mechanistic algorithms. The paper also discusses some challenges faced and how they were overcome.