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Simulations as an Educational Tool

Teacher-guided simulation development and interaction is a useful tool to give students hand-on learning experience with complex real-world systems.
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April 21, 2025 11:59 pm

About this idea
The use of simulations can be found in a vast number of scientific fields. The development and use of the simulations to aid a particular task requires many skills involved in STEM. It is often the case that teaching students about these various real-world systems in a hands-on manner is restricted for a myriad reasons. However, simulations could be a very useful tool for that task. Given the progress of certain highly technical fields, certain aspects of the very same simulation toolkits and skill used in contributing to that body-of-knowledge are one and the same that is able to be used as an educational tool for students. There is also a lot of potential for the design of a simulation model in which student participation is used to collect data points, to be analyzed as a class project. This application could vary in scope, from fostering curiosity in STEM, to allowing students to participate in state-of-the-art research.
Impact
My goal for this project is to introduce it as an educational program aimed at occupying a dedicated time-slot in an after-school program. This initial phase would be towards work-shopping some of the lesson plan to gauge things like: formulations for varying age-groups, work-shopping the nature of simulation inter-activeness that capture students attention, the types of real-world system simulations they are learning in school, as well as other possible STEM systems suitable for their age-group. This would present a novel learning environment that also builds extremely useful life skills; such as problem-solving and critical-thinking. I aim to bring this resource and educational program to low-resource school districts, and foster curiosity in students.
What I'll do with $5,000
$5,000 would allow me to: - acquire one more piece of hardware necessary for the program's development (mini-pc ~$1,000) - the mini pc will be used to develop, store, and run all the lesson plans - it will be brought with me, along with all other necessary resources, from site to site, to deliver the program - it will provide me with more 'compute-power' allowing more students to interact with the same system at a given time - the grant will also allow to shift more of my focus on the develop of the lesson plan, student-interaction architecture, etc., so that I can introduce it to after-school programs sooner. It will be covering day-to-day living expenses, so that I can get the technical-aspects set up in order to be pursed full-time (eventually getting to the point where I can support myself by providing this service)
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