Big Ideas
Here are the BIG IDEAS you will learn about in this lesson:
- Systems are everywhere! A pond, your school, your community, our climate—these are all systems. They all have two or more parts that interconnect to form a whole. All systems exhibit similar kinds of characteristics, whether they're in science, history, engineering, math, or literature!
- A system’s unique patterns of interconnection create the intriguing, and often puzzling, behaviors we observe—like vicious cycles, explosive growth, or "solutions" that make the situation worse.
- When we make a system’s parts and patterns visible, we can better understand the system, predict how it might behave, and in some instances, influence that behavior.
- You can analyze all kinds of systems using a common set of tools that include graphs of trends over time, closed feedback loop diagrams of cause and effect, stock-flow structures, and computer models.