IN-PERSON: Applying Education

Abstract

Future-oriented science education is a recently established field that aims at reconstructing the conceptual, epistemological, and methodological structure of science to support students in recognizing the complexity of the present via an explicit focus on the plurality of the future. In the perspective of rethinking science from a future-oriented perspective, introducing in teaching elements of the science of complex systems can play a crucial educational role: indeed, their non-linear dynamics, the high sensitivity to initial conditions, and the complex forms of causation that include feedback effects and emergent properties can lead students to overcome classical Newtonian ideas of deterministic predictions of the future and to envision a range of multiple future scenarios. Key concepts of complex systems can be taught in many ways, one of which is through computational agent-based simulations. Indeed, these artefacts show that local interactions among the individual components of a system can generate complex (often counterintuitive) dynamics at the macroscopic level. In this contribution, we report the results of an activity conducted with high school students at the end of a teaching-learning module on simulations of complex systems. Specifically, we show how the basics of complex systems embedded in agent-based simulations fostered students’ development of future-scaffolding skills, i.e. skills to manage, rationally and emotionally, the uncertainty of the future through the construction of systemic pictures of the present. However, we show that some crucial competencies that the students exhibit in specific activities are difficult for them to verbalize, and this can lead to novel educational implications.