Page 75 - Getting the Picture Modeling and Simulation in Secondary Computer Science Education
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Defining and Observing Modeling and Simulation in Computer Science
needles. [...] incubation about 21 days, 9 out of 10 people die”, without reporting the
source. In the survey, S3b mentioned consulting her sister who studied medicine.
Team 6, exploring the effect of ambient warmth and the presence of food on life
of bacteria, did not report any research in their project documentation. Others
did not visibly engage in research but developed their models based on what they
already knew about the phenomena they modeled (e.g. Team 1 who explored
chemical reactions — in the survey S1a wrote they learned that in chemistry
lessons) or their presumptions (e.g. Team 7, who explored whether mousetraps
were more effective than cats in catching mice, or Team 5, who explored the 3 influence of weather on ice cream sales).
Abstraction. All students engaged in abstracting: choosing a level of abstraction, based on the decision they made with respect to relevancy of particular features and deciding what to include into their models and what to leave out.
In the recording we observed several students struggling to determine such a level of abstraction. For example, Team 1 — who initially neglected the teacher’s instruction to study the textbook first — had difficulties understanding the idea behind ABM and got ‘stuck’ in the notion of an aggregate state, e.g. thinking about pH as a contributing factor in a chemical reaction rather than the result of it. During the interview, S7a told us that he wanted his mice to reproduce but did not include this feature because he did not know how to implement males and females. It did not occur to him that gender of the mice was not relevant in his model. Finally, as required, all students who finished the project turned in wish lists with features or aspects that were not implemented yet but should be considered for the next version of the model, thus demonstrating they were able to decide what to include or leave out.
Formulation. The assignment required a description of the behavior of the model in a natural language, and all the students who finished their projects did that. However, several students needed help to formulate their problems appropriately: e.g., only after choosing the right level of abstraction did Team 1 manage to formulate their problem appropriately and, in the recordings, we heard S1a say, “Two of these things have to collide with each other and then something needs to happen”.
Requirements and Specification. In the recordings it turned out to be hard to observe a distinction between requirements and specifications — see the results on Verification and Validation for a comprehensive example.
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