Outreach to schools

From InterSciWiki

Our Human Social Dynamics group at the southern UC Campuses also hosts reports and discussions on experiments -- research and classrooms -- and how to interpret and learn from results. Our first responses to a request from math teacher David LeWine on his high-school simulation project are here:

http://eclectic.ss.uci.edu/~drwhite/center/Experiments.html

On Saturday, June 16, 2007, at 12:45PM, "Doug White" <drwhite@uci.edu> wrote: > >After your neat explication of the algorithm.... >where did we leave off, and your students leave off?

Since then, David LeWine reports:

From: David L <davlew@mac.com> To: Doug White <drwhite@uci.edu> Subject: Re: After your explication of the algorithm....

Great to hear from you again. Yes, I still would like to write a thoughtful response to all that was suggested. Just as an update, my students won first place in the Young Science Achievers Program, a science competition sponsored by AT&T and Lucent. They were thrilled.

I would like my students to do more simulations changing the algorithm that controls how the robots make their decision to see how robust their results are--that is to see to what extent their current results are independent of the particular algorithm used in the robot control program. The algorithm should be changed by having the robots base their decision on more or less information (bigger or smaller field of views) and by changing the criteria for a robot to be happy. Right now the robots have about a 100 degree field of view and all it takes to make a robot happy is for it to be looking at a robot it likes and be in close enough proximity to that robot; it doesn't matter what other robots are nearby.

However, now that they have won the competition (and $1000 dollars each), my students are reluctant to continue with this project. They told me they want to put all their energies into winning the Botball robotics tournament for our region next year (which has no cash prize). Last year they came in third, this year they came in sixth. They were disappointed and are determined to do better next year. We'll see. If our project is worth submitting to one of the more prestigious science competitions I may encourage them to do more work on it for that purpose. But to their credit they do not seem to be interested in the prestige of competitions such as the Westinghouse competition. If they don't do more work on it, I probably will myself--its a fun programming project.

--David

p.s. You are welcome to post the paper and my latest thoughts about the project

http://intersci.ss.uci.edu/wiki/pub/cliquesimulation.pdf (the prize-winning paper)

http://intersci.ss.uci.edu/wiki/pub/DavidL_initial_thoughts_on_the_clique_simulation_results.pdf (may be of special interest to Steve Doubleday)

>On Sun, 24 Jun 2007, Doug White wrote:

>> You might also want to have them look at Scott Page, The Difference, in support of the benefits of diversity

>> also James March's article on exploration and innovation in organizational learning