Teaching with Simulations What are Instructional
Simulations?When students use a model of behavior to gain a
better understanding of that behavior, they are doing a
simulation. For example: - When students are assigned roles as
buyers and sellers of some good and asked to strike deals to
exchange the good, they are learning about market behavior by
simulating a market. - When students take on the roles of party
delegates to a political convention and run the model
convention, they are learning about the election process by
simulating a political convention. - When students create an
electric circuit with an online program, they are learning about
physics theory by simulating an actual physical set-up. Why
Teach with Simulations? Instructional simulations have the
potential to engage students in "deep learning" that empowers
understanding as opposed to "surface learning" that requires
only memorization. Deep learning means that students: Learn
scientific methods including - the importance of model building.
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