Subject: high school text book or other curricular materials

Posted by John F. Heinbokel on 4/20/2009
In Reply To:high school text book or other curricular materials Posted by Torrey McMillan on 4/20/2009

Message:

Hi Torrey,

We’re neighbors of sorts, with our operation ‘next door’ in VT. Jeff Potash and I have been engaged for a while in teaching a variety of subjects using SD as a foundation. I’ll describe a couple of resources you might find useful.

For computer modeling in the environmental field, Andy Ford’s “Modeling the Environment,” published by Island Press, is excellent.

Two ‘games’ out of Dennis Meadows’ shop at UNH: “Fishbanks, LTD” and “STRATEGEM” would be great activities. I don’t know the current status of their availability, although in a pinch we might be able to be ‘neighborly’ and help with our way out of date copy of STRATEGEM, although it has issues with being dependent on an OLD operating system.

At the risk of being self-serving, Jeff and I have taught several interdisciplinary, SD-based courses – either for general education college, teacher-training, or middle-secondary level private school. One of those, “Sustainable Development,” is briefly described on our web-site (near the bottom of the following ‘page’: http://www.ciesd.org/influence/curricula.shtml). I just looked at the “Easter Island” stuff there for the first time in some time and realize that we never updated this material on our site after doing a fairly significant reworking of the simulation. I’m not in a position to do that upgrade right now. However, feel free to look at this material. It is quite similar to the current version in context and direction; if it seems like something you’d like to use or explore deeper, let us know and we can make sure you get/have the newer material. In the meantime, this is good incentive for us to at least think real seriously about updating this web-site material!

Hope that helps. Don’t be shy about rattling our cage, if we can be of further help.

John

PS I’ll second Len’s reference to “Systems 1,” as well.