Human Body Systems in K-12

Ülkem Yararbaş, a professor of nuclear medicine, serves on the medical faculty at Ege University. She is one of the founders of the Systems Thinking Association in Turkey. In addition to the elective systems thinking courses she gives to medical school students, she voluntarily supports the activities for the infusion of ST/SD in the education system conducted by System Thinking Association-Turkey.

Türkan Önal graduated with elementary science education, and she has been a teacher since 2017. She has worked for five years in Darüşşafaka where she met the Systems Thinking Association in Turkey. Last year she worked in Darüşşafaka to implement a system thinking approach into the middle school curricula via numerical modeling in 6th grade.

Jon Darkow has taught a variety of biology courses at the high school and college level for the past 18 years at Seneca East High School in and through Bowling Green State University. Currently, Jon teaches AP Biology, Anatomy and Physiology, Biology, and Physics. Jon has diverse academic training with a B.A. in Sociology from Ohio State University in 2000. He has a post-bachelor in Life Science Education and an M.Ed. in Curriculum and Instruction from Ashland University. Additionally, Jon has been completing graduate courses in the Department of Biological Science at Bowling Green State University. Jon has developed a  robust set of online system dynamics models for students to explore biology and ecology at www.jondarkow.com.

Teacher of mathematics for 30+ years and System Dynamics (SD) Modeling for 20 years, at the secondary school level. She has taught mathematics and SD modeling courses at the university level and teaches 3 online SD modeling courses for instructors each year.
She provided a NASA sponsored, STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) workshop entitled “Modeling, Analysis and Simulation in Mathematics Using System Dynamics” (2008) and a two-week MODSym (Modeling and Simulation) course (2013), both for secondary school Mathematics teachers and both in Langley, Virginia.
Dr. Fisher has written and directed two National Science Foundation grants. The first grant was entitled Cross-Curricular Systems Thinking and Dynamics Using STELLA (CC-STADUS) from 1993 – 1997. The second grant was entitled Cross-Curricular Systems: Training and In-service (CC-SUSTAIN) 1997 – 2001. In each of these grants secondary school teachers from the disciplines of math, science, and social science were trained in the design of SD models and they wrote curriculum for their classes during the three-week summer training. She has written two books containing System Dynamics modeling lessons published by isee systems, inc.