Over the past several years, faculty at Trinity College have engaged in a number of project to develop their modelling skills, to incorporate modelling into established courses, to use modelling as foundation for new interdisciplinary courses, to develop modelling skills in our students, and to reach out to pre-college educators to support their development in similar directions. Our more successful experiments share at least one common element: They begin with a conceptually simple theme, and then systematically and progressively build complexity, realism, and connections to more diverse fields, around the central theme. Such structure allows the development of entire course on foundation of system dynamic modelling, rather than episodic modeling exercises common in many other educational settings. An additional benefit is that several of our experiments have begun to provide unexpectedly reinforcing support for other experiments. In this contribution we briefly describe these recent experiments which, together, can provide significant support to pre-college educators and educational systems seeking to enhance the system dynamic components of the curricula. Our efforts to provide initial modeling training for teachers rested upon a graded sequence of modeling exercises progressively developing more complex, realistic models of human population growth, then connecting the population dynamics to the other topics of interest to the teachers. Recognizing this strategy as an effective one for building modeling skills, we have used it as conceptual foundation for an interactive computer-based tutorial for the building of STELLA II models. This Tutorial can support independent learning of this language, serve as a self-paced adjunct to more traditional modeling instruction, or provide a means to convey basic skills and concepts to students using models within a particular course. Following these successes, we developed in 1993 an interdisciplinary (primary biology, history, and economic) college course (Plagues and People) in which a simple model disease transmission served as the core model with which to develop diverse scenarios addressing historical, social, and economical factors of disease in setting ranging from ancient Greece to the modern case of AIDS. A more recent course was based on initially simple models of human population growth and explored how human population dynamics have influenced migration and settlement patterns, was and conquest, resource exploitation, disease, and development pf social and economic systems.

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Date created

• 1995

Type

• Document

Processing Activity

• Processing documentation available at: https://wiki.albany.edu/display/SCA/Processing+Ingested+Digital+Files

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• Creative Commons BY-NC-ND Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International

  
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ITEM CONTEXT

Part of

12420ec6bd5f758d2b4dea59aabd75a9

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Part of

23d738ba88f8333bc39725f9cb5bd0b8

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Part of

b83f2ce2912343b559f967dd985da515

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Collection

System Dynamic Society Records

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Collecting area

• This collection is part of the University Archives