Would you be impressed if your students could simulate Nature on a computer?

The K-12 National Science Education Standards (NSES) focus on the earth system, especially its materials, structure, material cycles, energy, origin, and evolution. Dynamical systems such as the earth system are simply parts of the universe whose components interact and change through time. Over two centuries ago, it became clear that the key to understanding much of Nature is to build and then solve mathematical models of these systems. Recently, the once intimidating field of modeling has become widely accessible through user-friendly applications such as Stella and Berkeley Madonna. Models are constructed graphically with reservoir icons to represent variables that change through time, pipes for controlling the rates of change, and arrows to enable variables to interact.

This introduction to modeling is intended primarily for high school science teachers with little or no experience in computer modeling. Participants first predict the response of a simple physical system (water reservoir with an input and output) to a perturbation and then collect measurements to test their predictions. They enter and graph their data in the modeling program. Finally, they construct a computer model and experiment numerically until the model results agree with their data. The basic water reservoir model is easily modified to explore a variety of earth system processes emphasized in the NSES, e.g. climate; the rock, water, and carbon geochemical cycles; ice sheet profiles; and oscillating prey-predator populations.