Textbook

Lawrence M. Leemis, Stephen K. Park, Discrete Event Simulation - A First Course, Pearson Prentice Hall, ISBN 13: 978-0131-42917-8 --- BEWARE THE INTERNATIONAL EDITION

There are two textbooks on reserve in the Arthur Lakes Memorial Library.

Unfortunately, there are no electronic versions of this text are available (or so I'm told).

Learning Methods

This will not be a traditional lecture course. Instead, it will be taught using an active learning technique known as formal learning groups. Here is how they will work.

A semester will have three rounds of learning groups (LGs), each about four weeks long. Students will be randomly assigned to learning groups at the beginning of each round.

1. "Lectures" will begin immediately with learning group time. LGs should review the previous assignment's learning goals and discuss the new content. LGs are expected to rearrange the room furnishings to accommodate their group work. The instructor will circulate through the learning groups to record participation points, observe discussions, and answer questions.

2. After the initial group time, there will be a brief discussion of the current assignment's topics, perhaps working through a few example problems or debating some finer points of a topic. This will be led by the instructor but guided by student input.
3. Important topics in the next reading assignment will be introduced to the students.
4. The balance of the lecture period will be a more formal (but short) lecture period interspersed with some problems and guided discussions for learning groups.
5. Before the end of most lecture periods, learning groups will have an opportunity to see the next group assignment and discuss how the work load will be divided among the members.

Student Evaluation

Students should familiarize themselves with the collaboration policy for graded work.

Learning Group Quizzes

At the end of each learning group round, there will be a quiz over the material covered during the learning group. These are Learning Group Quizzes. These quizzes will be taken independently by each LG member, but each member's course grade will be based (in part) on their individual performance as well as their learning group's performance.

Assignments

Programming and written assignments may we worth different numbers of points, but their percentile grades are all weighted the same when calculating the "Assignment" portion of your course grade. Every effort will be made to have your assignments graded within two weeks, but you should understand that the assignment grader has a (graduate) student's schedule as well!

Programming Languages

You are free to use a general purpose programming language of your choice, within these constraints:

1. It must be available on the standard CSM Linux machines (CTLM B60), without additional installs or (re)configurations.
2. It must provide a simple pseudo random number generator (we will learn that not all pRNGs are of equal quality).

3. It must provide access to command line parameters (aka argv).

In general, computer simulation is not a graphics intense software domain; so graphics support and portability of simulation codes from between operating systems should not be a big hurdle.

In addition to these language requirements, programming projects will meet certain design requirements as well.