From Sherry Turkle’s influential paper titled Seeing Through Computers I like this section:
In the physics department, the debate about simulation was even sharper. Only a small subset of real-world physics problems can be solved by purely mathematical, analytical techniques. Most require experimentation in which one conducts trials, evaluates results, and fits a curve through the resulting data. Not only does the computer make such inductive solutions easier, but as a practical matter, it also makes many of them possible for the first time. As one faculty member put it:
A student can take thousands of curves and develop a feeling for the data. Before the computer, nobody did that because it was too much work. Now, you can ask a question and say, “Let’s try it.” The machine does not distance students from the real, it brings them closer to it.
Because it pitches computers as tools for visualising and experimenting with systems that need to be understood mathematically. Not just at the advanced theoretical level but all through education – the learning of mathematics through using a wide range of systems of representation.
What I think is missing from this article is reference to simulations as being tools for cognitive offloading and the system of representation having an optimal relationship with the problem space and the individual or group researching the problem. Graphical simulations are powerful where emergent dynamics, iterations through generations and parallel processes are important, and where morphology is preserved in the simulation this can help too.
