Candid Student Reports

The following (emails) were written by members of the TIP Tapper program during the third day of the first week. Some elements may have been removed for various reasons, but the text that remains is in the student's own words.

 
Today was, like the spiffiest day I've ever done 
stuff on a computer.  In the morning we killed 
off this poor little diabetic lady named Joy 
many many times trying to find out how to fix 
her.  We got really close to solving it, but she 
still went into a coma, like, 3 times a day.  
After lunch we learned how to use Stella and we 
got to make all these really really really 
spiffy models (actually, like, 2, but whatever) 
But anyway, Stella is the most funnest thing 
I've ever done, and now I (Natalie) know how to 
do it. Oh boy oh boy oh boy!  I'm very very very 
excited about Stella.  OH BOY!  I'm excited!!!

Today was slightly less difficult. We even got 
to commit murder.  O.K. See you.  I think I need 
to work more on this computational stuff.


 Natalie and Russell

 
Today was so much better than the previous two 
days!  We both understood what we were doing.  
And STELLA is really easy compared to regular 
computer programming.  The Diabetes was fun to 
work with, we didn't have enough time to totally 
fix the model used AIDA, but we came pretty 
close.  It is fortunate, however, that we 
weren't using a real patient.  We would have a 
room full of dead bodies.

Learning how to use STELLA with the Lynx and 
Hare simulation was fun and easy.   The 
differential equations were done really fast at 
the end of class, but it didn't seem too hard.  
Maybe that's because there were so few 
variables.  Our charts wre messy, though, and 
Bob2 said that's not going to help for the next 
projects we do.  

Kevin didn't crash anything today.


 Renee and Ryan

 
Stella is pretty fun and easy to use--a lot 
easier than the stuff we've used up until now. 
That's about all I have to say right now. 
Looking forward to evening session (ha ha).


 Harding

 
I liked Stella.  It is very logical and makes it 
easy to manage a lot of variables.  It was nice 
that we were able to learn more about modeling 
withought getting confused!  Well, i'll see how 
evening session goes today!


 Eric

 
Today we learned the basics of making Stella 
models.  We did models of populations, the 
spreading of epidemics, and other stuff.  We 
also tried to balance the glucose level of a 
diabetic woman. Stella was surprisingly easy to 
work with, and today was fun.


 Liz and Jason

 
 Today was a little easier. We learned to use 
Stella , which is a pretty cool program.  It was 
nice to make our own mini-models, which made it 
easier to interpret the output of the program.  
The diabetic model was also interesting, but 
difficult to answer.  The diabetic model was 
easier to understand than the other models, 
because it only required filling in a few 
fields.


 Kevin and Alexander

 
Today seemed less confusing than the previous 2 
days. We learned how to use STELLA which turned 
out to be very easy to use. Using STELLA we 
recreated an epidemic and an island of hares and 
lynx. Early in the day we TRIED to cure a 
diabetic using the AIDA simulation (good thing 
nobody in this class is a doctor!) I think we 
all killed the patient. And also, Kevin didn't 
crash any more computers today.


 Matt and Madhura

 
Today we all learned the mechanics of a program 
called STELLA. I personally feel that this is 
one of the most interesting things we've done 
thus far. STELLA is really a very useful and 
quite fun program to run. Our poor diabetic 
patient from this morning, Joy, didn't do too 
well while we were doing our AIDA simulation 
this morning. We tried but Joy still died.


 Ben and Bev