Issues in the Design and Use of System-Dynamics-Based Interactive Learning Environments

The author presents an overview of the topics covered by the articles in this special issue on system-dynamics-based interactive learning environments (ILEs). The article shows how a system-dynamics-based ILE is being designed to portray the intimate relationship between structure and dynamic behavior in complex domains. The complexity and need for a structural foundation for the interpretation of behavior create the following challenges: to associate behavior to underlying structure; to explicitly represent the integration processes, including delays (lags), that drive dynamic behavior; to trace the various feedback structures so as to identify what determines their relative contribution to the overall behavior; to facilitate the strengthening and weakening of such loops as a basis for policy design; to represent any nonlinearity that might exist and map each operating point onto them so as to identify variations in dynamic sensitivity; to effectively portray the significance of uncertainty and vagueness; and last but not least, to put it all together.