In The Shape of Change, by Rob Quaden, Alan Ticotsky and Debra Lyneis, students engaged in games and other classroom activities to observe what was changing over time. They drew behavior over time graphs to examine how these things changed, and they related the patterns of behavior to other changes in their experience.

Now, with The Shape of Change: Stocks and Flows students build on the earlier lessons to understand why the changes occurred. Why did doubling cause the number of friends to grow exponentially? Why did the mammoths go extinct? Why did the boiling water cool to room temperature?

Step-by-step, students build stock/flow maps explaining each lesson activity. These stock/flow maps are tied directly to students’ earlier behavior over time graphs and to the underlying causal loop structures that drive the changes. That way, students begin to build systems thinking skills – an understanding of how structure creates the behavior we observe all around us.