Introduce the concept of modeling and simulation.

There are about fifteen known archetypes with an interesting set of relationships among them.

SystemsWiki's Musings

While these pictures represent very different things there is a common essence.

All you wanted to do was put a bird feeder in your yard to attract birds and make for a more pleasant morning. And...

All the following have a common characteristic.

What do activities of these images have in common?

When endeavoring to develop an understanding of the nature of something it is generally useful to create a model of some type to aid in surfacing that understanding.

The model construction process is actually a balancing loop which endeavors to employ an abstract version of real events to form a model which produces conclusions and behavior which mimic the real events.

This is a model depicting the interactions of the Aesop's Fable "The Boy Who Cried Wolf."

All you wanted to do was put a bird feeder in your yard to attract birds and make for a more pleasant morning. And...

The purpose of this model is to have the user change the value of stocks, flows and converters to experience a variety of different graphical results. Understanding this generic model is important pre-requisite to learning about intravenous drugs in the body, radioactivity, self-esteem, water flowing from a drain and many other basic natural systems.

What do activities of these images have in common?

The interaction of a population of Moose and Wolves.

This is a model depicting the interactions of the Aesop's Fable "The Boy Who Cried Wolf."

This common archetype of systems that include relapse or recidivism allows exploration of the unintended effects of increasing upstream capacity and swamping downstream capacity. The increase in the relapse rate eventually returns to swamp upstream capacity as well. A social welfare example, based on a TANF case study, from How Small System Dynamics Models Can Help the Policy Process. N. Ghaffarzadegan, J. Lyneis, GP Richardson. System Dynamics Review 27,1 (2011) 22-44 Conference version at http://bit.ly/HlxtZj

Introduce the concept of modeling and simulation.

There are about fifteen known archetypes with an interesting set of relationships among them.

LinkedIn, YouTube

When endeavoring to develop an understanding of the nature of something it is generally useful to create a model of some type to aid in surfacing that understanding.

This is a model depicting the interactions of the Aesop's Fable "The Boy Who Cried Wolf."

This is a model depicting the interactions of the Aesop's Fable "The Boy Who Cried Wolf."

While these pictures represent very different things there is a common essence.

When endeavoring to develop an understanding of the nature of something it is generally useful to create a model of some type to aid in surfacing that understanding.

Rain Barrel Model

Simplest Innovation diffusion model from Sterman's Business Dynamics Ch 9