Abstract:

At present, the entire higher education system focuses largely on redesigning the education system, with emphasis on new technologies. Advances in this field have not provided overcoming barriers in learning scientific concepts and theories, and have also failed to improve the level of dedication and effort of students to achieve academic excellence goals.

In this context, a new perspective is offered by group learning in workshops. The literature related to the topic reminds us that teamwork plays an important role in detecting and overcoming learning errors, especially the conceptual ones, and also in improving the capabilities of relational knowledge absorption issues that have not been sufficiently explored.

Team learning has a great impact in reducing conceptual and logical errors, improving academic performance and competency-based learning by students (changes in individual behavior, leadership, effort, dedication, etc.).

Hence, our goal is twofold. First, we want to explore whether learning through modeling and simulation workshops can improve results on individual and / or group participants and second, if the tandem "Model - Simulation" ("M-S" from now on) can be a support tool for discovery, creativity, design or systematic outline of reality, when added to an existing training plan.

The modeling language, which is logical and formal, translates the model (either conceptual or empirical) into a specific one, to run it and solve it on a computer. This approach of designing software for model simulation becomes more useful, in most cases, to evaluate the system piece by piece. For example, using a multimedia tool may be more useful to supplement or replace the experimental part of the phenomenon or behavior under study.

Our proposal is to extend some diagrams and develop scientific concepts to describe the events or phenomena effectively, through a systemic approach. Such an approach recognizes the impact of changes in the behavior of any of its parts on the behavior of the system as a whole. This will need an overview of the features of the system entities at different levels of abstraction and with different temporal representations.

In short, we intend to study the behavior of the system through a formal representation or model, so that the user acquires the skills to evaluate, interpret and generalize reality. To do this, we will use a appropriate language so that we can simulate the model and observe the effects of the intervention on the system as a whole. In other words, we intend to offer students a tool which allows them to observe the progressive sequence of processes and the impact of their intervention in the system.

Keywords:

Modeling, simulation, workshops, systemic knowledge.