Shape of Change (Lesson 3): The Mammoth Game, including Stocks and Flows |
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Author(s):
Rob Quaden, Alan Ticotsky, & Debra Lyneis |
Subject:
Cross-Curricular |
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From "The Shape of Change." Teams of students play a dice and graphing game to track the population growth and decline of a herd of twenty mammoths, including learning why change occurs by means of stock/flow diagrams. |
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Shape of Change (Lesson 2): Making Friends, including Stocks and Flows |
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Author(s):
Rob Quaden, Alan Ticotsky , & Debra Lyneis |
Subject:
Cross-Curricular |
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From "The Shape of Change." A non-competitive tagging game, wherein students track the rate of growth of friendship and discover the effect of rates of growth, including showing why change occurs by means of stock/flow diagrams. |
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Shape of Change (Lesson 11): Keystone Species in an Ecosystem--Using Connnection Circles to Tell the Story, including Stocks and Flows |
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Author(s):
Rob Quaden, Alan Ticotsky, & Debra Lyneis |
Subject:
Cross-Curricular |
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From "The Shape of Change." Students read a chapter from a skillfully written science book and use connection circles to unravel a mystery of nature. In the Stocks and Flows lesson, students will build the stock/flow map from the ground up.
Complex Systems Connection: Separate Cause and Effect, Short and Long Term Conflicts. This lesson illustrates how scientists often see effects or results of actions that set consequences in motion many years prior. They must link the effects back to the root cause or causes of the problem. Part of the backstory for this lesson illustrates that hunters aiming for profit in the short term can destroy the resource so it's not available in the long term. |
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Shape of Change (Lesson 10): Do You Want Fries With That? Learning about Connection Circles, including Stocks and Flows |
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Author(s):
Rob Quaden, Alan Ticotsky, & Debra Lyneis |
Subject:
Cross-Curricular |
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From "The Shape of Change." In this lesson, students use connection circles to examine an article about the health risks associated with rising French fry consumption. As in previous lessons, they identify what is changing and describe how it is changing, but in this lesson they begin to think about why it is changing, as they create feedback loops.
Complex Systems Connection: Separate Cause and Effect, Short and Long Term Conflicts. Eating an unhealthy diet may not seem to hurt a person immediately, but it can have long-term negative impacts on overall health. Because we may not feel the effects right away, it can be easy to continue the bad behavior. People eat unhealthy food because it tastes good; it gives them immediate pleasure. Over the long run, however, the effects accumulate, leading to poor overall health. |
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Shape of Change (Lesson 1): In and Out Game, including Stocks and Flows |
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Author(s):
Rob Quaden, Alan Ticotsky, & Debra Lyneis |
Subject:
Cross-Curricular |
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From "The Shape of Change" including "The Shape of Change: Stocks and Flows." A simple activity that introduces and reinforces the understanding of change over time, including the use of stock/flow diagrams that show why the change happens. |
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Retire Rich App - Mini Lesson |
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Author(s):
Anne LaVigne |
Subject:
Cross-Curricular |
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Retire Rich is a free, engaging, easy-to-use app for students and others to explore the implications of different plans to save for retirement. Students can change annual savings, interest rates, and the timing of saving to see what happens over the course of a lifetime. |
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Pre-College Student Understanding of Accumulations: An Experiment at a WPI Summer Workshop for Students |
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Author(s):
Diana Fisher, Chris DiCarlo, Alan Ticotsky, & Rob Quaden |
Subject:
System Dynamics |
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This paper presents the results of a pre- and post-test assessment given to 18 students ages 14 to 17 years who participated in a WPI Sustainability Workshop in the summer of 2014, where systems thinking and system dynamics modeling were the primary tools used to study environmental issues. The pre- and post-test were designed to assess the students' ability to determine simple dynamic behavior of phenomenon when the rate of change of the phenomenon was given in text, pictorial, or graphical form. The assessment determined that students have a reasonably robust intuitive ability to determine simple dynamic behavior from text and pictorial descriptions but not from graphical descriptions. |
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Portrait Of A Civilization. A Study of Resource Use and Sustainability- STELLA Model and Simulation Game |
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Author(s):
Alison Yahna, & Doug Girod |
Subject:
Cross-Curricular |
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From CC-STADUS. Edited by Andrew Jonca and Ron Zaraza. The story of the prosperity and collapse of Mahenjo Daro and its application to our modern fossil-fuel civilization. |
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Zipped (Models & PDF)
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Population Planner App - Mini Lesson |
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Author(s):
Anne LaVigne |
Subject:
Cross-Curricular |
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Population Planner is a free, engaging, easy-to-use app for students and others to explore how populations can grow or decline over time.
http://www.clexchange.org/curriculum/apps/ Students can change the initial population, death rate, and birth rate to see what happens over 100 years. |
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Population Dynamics, Part D: Connecting Past, Present and Future, Part D:America's Baby Boom and Global Youth Bulges |
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Author(s):
Jeffrey Potash, & Jennifer Andersen |
Subject:
Cross-Curricular |
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The Population Dynamics series are designed to supplement existing high school history curricula and be largely self-directed by students outside of class time. The lessons are intended to introduce students to a variety of systems tools (behavior-over-time graphs, stock/flow maps, models/simulations) alongside primary and secondary historical resources. Part D focuses on America's baby boom and global youth bulges.
Complex Systems Connection: Separate Cause and Effect. Baby booms and youth bulges play out over time. The impacts of population dynamics may cause changes to the environment and social systems that will be felt over several generations. It is difficult to predict the effects of issues that are decades away, and even harder to implement policies that will correct for them. Baby booms and youth bulges can create push factors that cause particular age groups to migrate to new countries. Young or old, people respond to shrinking opportunities by looking outside national borders. One country's youth bulge may become another region's immigration influx.
Cause within System. The decision to have a child is very personal, but common factors are often present (age, finances). These factors also affect the rate at which people die, leave (emigrate) or come to a new area (immigrate). This demographic system generates its own behavior. The particular trajectory of population growth or decline is a consequence of these various flows of people.
Shifting Burden. Humanitarian aid is widely provided to nations in need. When aid creates a dependence between the giver and receiver, the ability of the receiving country to meet its own needs may be compromised. Over time the "burden" of providing for a country's citizens may be transferred to the intervener - the country or countries providing the aid. |
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Link to the file: http://clexchange.org/curriculum/complexsystems/populationdynamics/popdynD.asp
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