Our Mission
Project GUTS’ mission is to prepare students for future endeavors in Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics and Computing by providing them with opportunities to build scientific inquiry skills and use technology to explore real-world problems. Project GUTS was designed for students from all different backgrounds to engage in scientific inquiry by investigating topics of interest to their local communities and sharing their experiments and findings in order to inform fellow students and community members.
Our Approach
- Attract students by making science and computing relevant and dynamic,
- Prepare students for future endeavors in STEM and computing fields,
- Retain student interest by offering open ended challenges,
- Assess how teachers’ participation in Project GUTS impacts how they think about and teach STEM and computing in the classrooms, and
- Enhance existing partnerships for program sustainability
The organizing framework for Project GUTS is the practice of scientific inquiry with agent-based models. The study of complex adaptive systems serves as a unifying theme for GUTS curriculum. Peer mentoring and community networks serve as project components designed to support students and teachers committed to teaching modern, computer-enabled scientific practices.
Making agent based modeling in StarLogo is an extension of programming in StarLogo—instead of having only one turtle in StarLogo, agent based models have many turtles! These turtles can represent chemical compounds, people, animals, or even ideas. Collections of turtles are used to model complex adaptive systems made up of many parts.