I don’t quite know how to identify a science idea for a scratch project for USN students. I had no idea who the students are, what they care about, and what might interest them. I’m just going to talk about using Scratch/NetLogo to explore scientific phenomena in general.
While I don’t know how to identify a specific science idea/topic, I think the big idea here is complexity—understanding that certain natural phenomena are complex systems whose properties emerge from multiple elements in the system in a non-linear way. I think students will learn to understand what complex systems, emergence and levels mean, by investigating one (or more) complex system deeply and also exploring a variety of complex systems. I’m less concern about which of the complex systems we ask students to investigate, and I’m more interested about how they investigate a system. (Students might have different relationships with different physical systems—e.g. some of which they can see with their eyes, and some they can’t. So there might be reasons to choose one system over others to investigate, but that depends on students’ interests/experiences.)
As other people have said on this blog, there seems to be a distinction between using models 1) to represent and 2) to model. Using models to represent means that a model serves as an image for a phenomenon. Using models to model means that modeling is part of inquiry. If the goal of engaging students with computational models is to help students understand / develop images of scientific concepts in ways that might be hard to achieve with other media, then it seems like models are to represent. If the goal of engaging students with computational models is to engage students in scientific inquiry, then it seems like models need to be use to model—not just to watch what happen, so that students can better imagine a phenomenon, but students have to think about what level of model is appropriate for the question they are asking, what to include in that level of model, etc.
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