Lesson 3 - How This Course is Organized

This Course is organized into 18 Units:

• Unit 2 - Basic Concepts
• Unit 3 - Exploring and Running a Simple Model
• Unit 4 - Building a Simple Model
• Unit 5 - Understanding and Working with Elements
• Unit 6 - Carrying Out a Dynamic Simulation
• Unit 7 - Modeling Material Flows
• Unit 8 - Representing Complex Dynamics: Feedback Loops
• Unit 9 - Representing Complex Dynamics: Delays
• Unit 10 - Building Hierarchical Models
• Unit 11 - Dealing with Dates and Time
• Unit 12 - Probabilistic Simulation: Part I
• Unit 13 - Probabilistic Simulation: Part II
• Unit 14: Modeling Discrete Events
• Unit 15 - Modeling Scenarios
• Unit 16 - Documenting Your Model
• Unit 17: Creating Dashboards and Player Files
• Unit 18: The Next Steps: Becoming an Expert GoldSim Modeler

A Unit will typically take from 30 minutes to as long as 2 hours or more to complete, depending on your experience, how methodical and carefully you tend to work, and the material being covered (some of the later Units are much more complex than the earlier Units).

Each Unit is divided into a number of “Lessons”. Within the Lessons, we will sometimes refer to an “Example” model that you will be instructed to open and look at.  In other Lessons, you will be assigned an “Exercise” – a simple model that you will build in order to learn a particular concept.  The completed Exercises are available to you to download, but of course you will learn much more by first attempting each Exercise yourself.

Each Unit concludes with a summary of the key concepts and features that were covered.