A school that prepares for sustainability management: the case of the Palau model

Humanity’s transition to sustainable development requires society to have a culture of decision-making that takes into account the long-term perspective of interaction with complex systems that demonstrate a non-linear response to impacts. Modern school education does not teach to make such decisions, which may be one of the reasons why modern schooling is in crisis. To provide useful experience for real-life decision-making, the authors propose including interaction with simulation models in education. In this work, we talk about the experience of independently creating and using such a model in the educational process. The authors proposed a model that teaches how to find optimal ways of using fish stocks in several interconnected water areas. In honor of the experience of the Republic of Palau popularized by David Attenborough, this model is named Palau model. The dynamics of such a system are counterintuitive, where restrictions on fishing ultimately lead to an increase in fish catches. The work describes the logic behind the Palau model calculations and discusses its implementation using the R language that facilitates the study of its properties. In the 2021 pedagogical experiment, the model was implemented using Google Sheets for 10th and 11th-grade high school students. Despite the lack of experimental data, the experiment showed the admissibility of using such models in the real educational process. The authors consider the development and testing of similar educational tools to be promising.