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Overview


Learning Goals

Working through this course will leave the reader with an appreciation of the process of developing an appropriate model to address a research question. Some of the core theoretical concepts that underpin modelling with a focus on modelling socio-ecological and socio-technical systems, will be introduced.

Course Structure

This introductory course is structured into three subsections:

  1. What is a model? We all use models in various ways in our daily as well as professional life, mostly without even realising. This sections introduces modelling as problems solving, different purposes of models, model attributes and types.
  2. Simulation and the Modelling Cycle: Here simulation as the experimental use of models and the modelling cycle as an iterative way of problem analysing, model building, simulation, and data analysis are introduced.
  3. Simulation in Social Sciences: Starting from the history of modelling techniques and methods in the social sciences, a short comparison of techniques and a few milestones are discussed.

This course acts as an introduction to both the Netlogo and Vensim courses.