{"id":2470,"date":"2011-05-04T15:21:16","date_gmt":"2011-05-04T19:21:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.easterbrook.ca\/steve\/?p=2470"},"modified":"2011-05-04T15:21:16","modified_gmt":"2011-05-04T19:21:16","slug":"teaching-with-simulations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.easterbrook.ca\/steve\/2011\/05\/teaching-with-simulations\/","title":{"rendered":"Teaching with simulations"},"content":{"rendered":"

During a break in the workshop<\/a> last week, Cecilia Bitz<\/a> and I managed to compare notes on our undergrad courses. We’ve both been exploring how to teach ideas about climate modeling to students who are not majoring in earth sciences. Cecilia’s course on\u00a0Weather and Climate Prediction<\/a> is a little more advanced than mine<\/a>, as she had a few math and physics pre-requisites, while mine was open to any first year students. For example, Cecilia managed to get the students to run CAM, and experiment with altering the earth’s orbit. It’s an interesting exercise, as it should lead to plenty of insights into connections between different processes in the earth’s system. One of the challenges is that earth system models aren’t necessarily geared up for this kind of tinkering, so you need good expertise in the model being used to understand which kinds of experiments are likely to make sense. But even so, I’m keen to explore this further, as I think the ability to tinker with such models could be an important tool for promoting a better understanding of how the climate system works, even for younger kids<\/a><\/p>\n

Part of what’s missing is elegant user interfaces.\u00a0EdGCM<\/a> is better, but still very awkward to use.\u00a0What I really want is something that’s\u00a0as intuitive as Angry Birds<\/a>. Okay, so I’m going to have to compromise somewhere – nonlinear dynamics are a bit more complicated than the flight trajectories of avian slingshot.<\/p>\n

But that’s not all – someone needs to figure out what kinds of experiments students (and school kids) might want to perform, and provide the appropriate control widgets, so they don’t have mess around with code and scripts.\u00a0Rich Loft<\/a> tells me there’s a project in the works to do something like this with CESM<\/a> – I’ll looking forward to that! In the meantime,\u00a0Rich suggested two examples of simple simulations of dynamical systems that get closer to what I’m looking for:<\/p>\n