Tips for teachers of simulation
This page contains some information to the teacher on how WebGPSS can be used in the educational process. This is a summary of the most important parts of a paper Teaching Simulation to Business Students – Summary of 30 Years’ Experience.
In order to get many students to a simulation course and to get good student ratings, it is important that the course is 1. enjoyable, i.e. fun, and 2. useful for future studies and work.
In order to make a simulation course fun, it is important to avoid overwhelming the students with difficult, unnecessary, technical details. Pre-course knowledge requirements should be avoided. It is important that the students after a very short time can construct simulation programs of non-trivial problems. Students learn modeling, not only a lot of syntax, and hence it is desirable that students can model new situations with already learnt concepts and that they seldom have to learn new syntax in order to handle new problems.
It is important that students are not tempted to do the wrong things by only having learnt parts of the whole simulation system. Furthermore, the simulation system used should seldom lead the students to make logical errors. An extensive error trapping system with clear error codes is desirable.
Since it is unlikely that students will continue to work with the specific software in the future, the goal of the course should not be to teach a specific simulation system, but rather to create informed buyers of simulation services and to make the students open to many different simulation systems, both GUI and text based.
Students prefer to get a text book that covers most of the simulation system and yet has a low price. Furthermore, they want to have access to the simulation system at a low cost.
For the teacher, it is important to be in total command of the simulation system. A smaller easy-to-learn system is preferable to a very large system that only the true specialist can master. Furthermore, it is for the teacher advantageous that the simulation system provides one compact listing of the whole program, so that it is easy to mark and debug student programs.
The best way to make the simulation course useful for future work is to end the simulation course with the students doing projects in companies. This implies that less time in the course is spent on learning simulation software and more on other aspects of the simulation process, such as input and output data, experimental runs, validation and presentation of the results. Many of the project programs done in WebGPSS have had continued use in the project corporations and many students have landed jobs thanks to their simulation project work.