In environmental science, the hydrology and ecology of watersheds is an important topic for which students can collect data from their local stream and from databases available on the web. But, students often only collect and plot the data, but go no further. Important questions such as the impact of a new housing development on their watershed are usually beyond their reach. The building of a computer model encourages students to look at mathematical correlations between variables and to research the likely effects of a development. The process of finding the relationships needed to build a model involves the students in a real world problem solving activity.
Computer models are also quite valuable in the study of physics.
Often, because they fail to understand the relationships underlying the problems, they simply memorize techniques for the problems they have seen and are unable to apply those techniques to different, yet related, problems. Computer models provide students with another means of expressing the relationships among the concepts. When the diagram for one model is visably similar to another model, the inherent structure of the problem becomes apparent. In addition, having the ability to manipulate the values in a model to represent a variety of scenarios and to create graphs as the model runs gives the student an efficient and dynamic way to test a variety of hypotheses, leading to richer problem solving experiences. Through models, students even have the opportunity to solve problems which they could not solve mathematically or for which they are unable to collect real data.