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modeling 2007
Shodor > SUCCEED > Workshops > Archive > modeling 2007

On the morning of June 27, 2006, Monte taught students how a bagel correlates to using a computer model in the Modeling Your World session. He said that the steps in creating bagels such as putting butter on them or toasting them are very complex steps. Steps like these are too intricate for the computer and it cannot carry out the task of creating the bagel or in the computer's case, running a command of some kind. Monte explained how computers are very "stupid" objects in that they cannot easily define things, like bagels, without specific, pre-formatted code. Even though computers can calculate many calculations in very short time spans, they require simple mathematical calculations like addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division.

In conclusion about bagels, the snack for the morning was the aforementioned food item. After Monte's presentation about the Bagel Activity, two interns, Solomon and Ebonee, began teaching students about the modeling program, Vensim. Solomon talked about how Vensim can model sickness, infection, and susceptibility. The program, Vensim, contains different tools such as variables, rates, auxiliary variables and connectors. Students in the modeling program successfully created a graph of sick, infected and susceptible people in a theoretical situation. The situation involved a group of 100 students at a school; 99 of the students were healthy and one was sick. Vensim managed to graph how the rates of infection increased and decreased among the student population. They also provided suggestions to make the model better that involved allowing people to recover and get better. After the students finished using the modeling program Vensim, they logged into Moodle and completed their journal entry for the morning.