At the beginning of the class students continued working on the four 4âs problems. Dr. Panoff taught the students the skills to break up or simplify each problem to find the easiest and best way to solve it; this skill would prove useful during the modeling instruction later in class. Next, the students discussed a model with a frog and princess. They described the model and it was drawn on the board. They specifically focused on what changed in the model and what aspects affected the other aspects of the model. This model and the concepts that were demonstrated were then transferred to a model that showed the spread of malaria. The concepts were very similar. The ability to transition between models, while the underlying concepts remain the same, was demonstrated by converting the model into one about computers. The influences and agents remained similar.
Next, the students were shown a physical model, a rope. The students thought about all the things that the rope can model, including concepts in physics, chemistry, and mathematics. This reinforced the previously addressed notion that things can model other things. The students then went to the Shodor Rabbits and Wolves model. They observed what occurred, the variability of the program, and the different patterns that the model showed. This model also brought up the concepts of rules, behavior modeling, agents, and depictions.
For the remainder of class, the students worked on creating their own models in AgentCubes. The students began by creating a model to demonstrate susceptible people, infected people, and recovered people. At the beginning, the students made different agents and depictions for healthy and sick people and the world. The students then made the healthy agents move randomly. After successfully accomplishing this, the students made the sick agents infect the healthy agents, resulting in the change in their depictions. Then, the students made the sick agents move less frequently to model the slowing down of a person when he/she is sick. After break, the students added in recovery to the model. The students created a time parameter to keep track of how long each agent was sick, and after a certain period of time, the agent would recover and become immune. Additionally, students created doctors who could cure and immunize the sick agents.