Introducing Computer Simulation into the High School: An Applied Mathematics Curriculum.

The foci for mathematics education in the 1980s have been clearly stated by the public, as reported in the Priorities in School Mathematics project (Suydam and Higgins 1980). Two areas high on the agenda are problem solving and integrating computers into the curriculum. New sec ondary level materials, Introduction to Sim ulation: The System Dynamics Approach, funded by a grant from the U.S. Office of Education (Grant #G007903439), address both of these issues and are currently being negotiated with commercial publishers. Simulation is a way of analyzing prob lems by using a representation or model of a situation and then exercising the model to see how it behaves under different circum stances. Originally, the word simulate meant to imitate or feign. A simulation im itates a real system by using some kind of model. As a simplified representation of a system, the model aids one in understand ing how the system operates. A simulation model may be a physical model, a mental conception, a mathematical model, or a computer model. Many simulations involve physical mod els. The United States Army Corps of En gineers has constructed a physical model of the Mississippi River to study ways of less ening the impact of flooding. Wind tunnels and wave tanks are other forms of simula tion in which a physical model is used to imitate a larger system. Since physical models are often rela tively expensive to build and unwieldy to move, mathematical models are often pre ferred. In a mathematical model, symbols or equations represent the relationships in the system. To perform a simulation, the calculations indicated by the model are performed over and over. If these calcu lations have to be performed by hand, sim ulation can be time consuming and costly. In the last forty years, computer simula tion has replaced simulation using hand calculation. With the development of com puters, the cost of arithmetic computations has halved approximately every two years and is likely to decline at this rate for at least another decade. This decline means that simulation, once a rare and expensive way of solving problems, is now very in expensive.