Courses: SYSC 399U: Models in Science
Meets Universitiy Studies Cluster Course Requirements
Science in the Liberal Arts and Knowledge, Reason and Understanding
This interdisciplinary course focuses on the role of models in scientific inquiry. Students explore how scientists from a variety of disciplines use different types of models, including physical (scale), mathematical (analytic and numeric), agent-based, animal, and social network. To facilitate this exploration, the course is divided into three main sections.
- Definition: We compare different definitions of "Science," "the Scientific Method," and "model." Here we also look briefly at what philosophers of science have said about how models fit into scientific inquiry
- Analysis: We critically analyze a variety of models used in research from different disciplines. We will play with multiple types of (already constructed) computer simulation models to get a feel for how they can be used scientifically. We will discuss the strengths and weaknesses of modeling (in general) as a tool for posing and answering scientific questions. And we will identify modeling techniques that are best suited for answering different types of scientific questions.
- Synthesis: Students write a term paper where they either (1) identify a scientific question of interest and design a research project that uses scientific modeling to test it, (2) identify a field that could be furthered with scientific modeling and describe how this could be done, or (3) describe how scientific modeling is currently being used in a field of interest to relate scientific inquiry to a real-world problem.
The course provides both a conceptual understanding of how models are used in science and "hands on" experience exploring scientific inquiry using models as tools.
