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That's a wonderful idea, and I encourage you to pursue it! <br>
Alan Kay was suggesting doing something like that to document and model
the behavior of SimCity (aka Micropolis), so kids can understand and
modify it. <br>
<br>
I've posted some stuff on the OLPC wiki and my blog about that:<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Summer_of_Code/Ideas">http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Summer_of_Code/Ideas</a><br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Micropolis">http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Micropolis</a><br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.DonHopkins.com">http://www.DonHopkins.com</a><br>
<br>
I'd be glad to discuss it further with you! <br>
<br>
-Don<br>
<br>
<br>
Bobby Powers wrote:
<blockquote
cite="mid:23e2e54b0803181335l2a79e68n760833e7b504d9e@mail.gmail.com"
type="cite">Hi, I'm a master's student at the University of Bergen and
I'm interested in bringing System Dynamics to the XO. Before I start,
if there is a better mailing list for this just let me know (I briefly
looked through the other ones liked from the Wiki, and this seemed the
most appropriate).
<div><br>
</div>
<div>System Dynamics (SD) [1][2] aims to help people understand the
world by explicitly modeling how pieces of it work and then performing
experiments in these models. It is used around the world, frequently
in majority world countries, in development planning [3], for example.
More formally, its a methodology for examining and describing the
behavior of complex systems with an emphasis on the effects that
feedback loops and time delays have. At a basic level you have to
specify the mathematical equations for the different parts of your
system. The same problems can be solved by writing code in a
programming language (I had a course taught in Fortran a year ago...),
but usually in SD the modeling is done using a visual editor where you
can show causal relationships, stocks and flows graphically. I
personally think the biggest short-fallings of the discipline are the
barriers to entry: the current software is far from intuitive and all
the major commercial offerings (there are no FLOSS products) [4][5][6]
are very expensive (educational licenses alone are frequently > $500
USD). </div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>Will Wright studied SD and used ideas from it when designing
SimCity [7]. So I have several things I would like to work on: first
is a core simulator that can transform equations into code (I'm
currently working on this for my master's thesis, but don't have and
funding. eesh): I'm using the JIT library from the LLVM project to be
able to do this. Second I want to create a Sugar modeling interface
that makes it easy and fun to create models and explore their results
(collaboratively, I hope!), and third I want to hook this into
Metropolis. I think it would just be so cool if you could click an
icon in Metropolis and have the visual model that controls the
Metropolis world pop up (in the aforementioned editor) and be able not
only to fiddle with parameters, but change the structure! If all of
this goes smoothly and there is more time, I would love to add the
ability for models to interact with and manipulate geospatial data.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>I guess I am looking for people's reaction, is this something
people like? I'm certainly willing to adapt myself to the collective
needs and I wanted to get a discussion started before the application
deadline. Oh I guess a little more background on me: I attended RPI
in NY, USA for 2 years studying computer engineering, but transferred
because I wanted to do something more applied. I
studied environmental studies (at SUNY ESF) for a couple years, and got
back into coding through classes on ecological modeling and GIS. I've
been pretty heavily coding models, algorithms and interfaces for the
past 2 years, mainly in C#, ObjC and some Fortran, but the past 3
months I've been using C++ for 8 hours a day and Python here and there.
I've got a Mac with Linux (both FC8 and openSUSE10.3) and Windows, and
I've just started over the past few weeks to pick up GTK, although I've
used Cairo in a project for a couple months. I've only dabbled with
the XO, but am really looking forward to developing bundles for it.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>I'm eager to hear what you think! </div>
<div>yours,</div>
<div>Bobby Powers</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>[1] <a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_dynamics">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_dynamics</a></div>
<div>[2] <a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://www.systemdynamics.org/">http://www.systemdynamics.org/</a></div>
<div>[3] <a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://www.millenniuminstitute.net/">http://www.millenniuminstitute.net/</a></div>
<div>[4] <a moz-do-not-send="true" href="http://www.vensim.com/">http://www.vensim.com/</a></div>
<div>[5] <a moz-do-not-send="true" href="http://www.powersim.com/">http://www.powersim.com/</a></div>
<div>[6] <a moz-do-not-send="true" href="http://www.iseesystems.com/">http://www.iseesystems.com/</a></div>
<div>[7] <a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://www.futuresalon.org/2004/11/will_wright_kic.html">http://www.futuresalon.org/2004/11/will_wright_kic.html</a></div>
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