Similarly, such important global scale problems cannot be solved, and such global scale processes cannot be explained, by simply scaling up understandings that derive from small scale observations and experiments. Drawing on insights and techniques from the field of system dynamics, the Earth Curriculum encourages students to focus on the interactions among natural objects and processes, as well as on the objects and processes themselves. The grammar of which the Earth's stories are made consists of natural objects and processes that span many scales and many disciplines. The Earth Curriculum encourages students to integrate their understandings of natural processes at all scales, from the microscopic to the lab-bench scale, all the way up to the planetary scale. The Earth Curriculum encourages students to integrate their understandings of life processes, chemical processes, physical processes, and human processes.
Nature is the final arbiter of the quality of the model.
A good model also accurately represents the interactions among the slices of Nature in the model, just as a good story captures the essence of different types of real human interactions through fictional characters. No one really knows how to teach such intuition, but extensive experience learning direct from Nature is certainly an important building block. Models are an efficient way to identify important questions, and to formulate them in answerable ways. This interplay between questions, observations, hypotheses and modeling is at the heart of the scientific method. However, we believe that the time is ripe to expand the reach of these goals to many more students.