Teaching Undergraduate Sociologists Modeling and Computational Thinking

The introductory agent-based modeling course we are presenting aims to equip second-year sociology students with basic skills which are critical to transforming their research ideas into theories and computational models. Our course follows a general course on theory construction in social science. As one of the first interactions of undergraduate social science students with computer science concepts, the course partially serves as a CSO course; however, the main focus is on the higher-level skills needed to model social phenomena. This requires the course to maintain multiple foci on computer science and domain skills. In this paper, we present a course design considerations and establish a foundation for the comparison of agent-based models and the computational thinking and CSO skills required for undergraduate social scientists studying agent-based modeling.