Description

"The ModelSim project approaches its four core curriculum areas (Evolution, Population Biology, Electricity, and the Particulate Nature of Matter) with a distinctive and unified approach: in each of these subject areas, we encourage students to conceive of fundamental real-world phenomena in new ways.  And in each case, we provide learning environments for exercising this new way of thinking, which build on students’ intuitions to develop powerful and grounded understandings. 

This fundamentally new way of thinking is called “agent-based modeling.”  Within this perspective, complex phenomena are viewed as emerging from interactions between systems of simple elements, or “agents.”  By focusing on the behavior of these simple agents, and by using computational modeling to simulate interactions between many of these agents, scientists in a wide range of disciplines are introducing powerful new research methods."

This program is funded by NSF and run by researchers and designers from Northwestern University's Center for Connected Learning and Computer Based Modeling, where NetLogo was developed, Mind, Matter & Media Lab at Vanderbilt University, Transformative Learning Technologies Lab at Stanford University, and Inquire Learning. This is an interdisciplinary team with two decades of experience in computer-based modeling and curriculum development.

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