Grading will be an aggregate evaluation of the material your group turns in along with the presentation your group makes in class regarding your region. Individual efforts within each group will be evaluated as part of your overall class participation grade. Each person in each group will be asked to evaluate the performance of each other person in his or her group in an effort to provide a better gauge of individual effort on the group projects.

All written projects must be typed and double-spaced when turned in. You may turn in output directly from IFS, but in every case, the output must be accompanied by an explanation of what was done to produce the output in substantive terms. In other words, if you produce two tables showing different results for agricultural imports, explain why the tables differ and what your group was trying to accomplish by examining each set of results. Please see below for exact requirements of the assignment.

A few helpful links follow:

Barry's IFs web-site: http://www.du.edu/~bhughes/ifswelcome.html

IFs Variables List: http://www.du.edu/~bhughes/Syllabi/Borocksnew.htm (also linked from the IFs web-site)

As you know, IFs has several basic areas for investigation. They are demography, agriculture, energy, economics, and the environment. As you will note, there are also other variables focusing on social and political phenomena. I suggest that you use these as some of your independent variables.

For your group project, you are charged with examining one basic dependent variable (for instance, population growth in the demographic set or energy demand in the energy section) for each of the five basic groups listed in the previous paragraph. You should start first by identifying a problem for each issue area.  Then you can work to "fix" that problem.

Each group must produce two scenario runs for each variable: the base case (already contained in IFS) and an optimistic scenario that (in theory) solves the problem you have identified.  Pessimistic scenarios are not required, but can be used to illustrate how things might get worse for your country/region. The pieces of the output for each scenario should be accompanied by explanations of what parameters were changed to create each scenario. Be specific so that if I want to replicate your results, I will be able to do so. My replication of your results may be necessary, so that I can understand the logic of what you have tried to accomplish. The more you explain your results to me, the easier it will be for me to understand why you obtained certain results and why you made certain decisions regarding parameter changes.  I need to understand why you think your chosen independent variable(s) will have an impact on your dependent (problem) variable.

In particular, you are also required to develop "models" of the relationships of variables in each area. This means that in your presentation and your written work, you need to lay out the basic set of relationships you assume to be at work in producing the output for your chosen dependent variable. For instance, to produce a change in population growth rate you might theorize that birth control, level and economic development, and literacy rates will be the primary causal (independent) variables. It would best to do this in graphic form if possible. We can discuss this further if you wish or need ideas.

• Be Creative! Make your presentation interesting for the whole class to view and hear. You needn't be a showman, but you can be engaging and try to present your material in appealing ways. You are free to use video (we don't have audio in the room...sorry), pictures, graphs, etc.
• You might think about starting with a brief discussion of your country/region's major problems and why you decided to focus on the things you chose. This way it provides the audience with your logic. Showing that you did a little extra research (like going on to the web and print sources in the library and finding out what the major problems are will be considered a plus for your grade).
• You should also try to explain why you "solved" the problem in the way you did. Why did your optimistic scenario work? What happened to cause the pessimistic scenario to happen?
• All this be done in a maximum of 15 minutes.

• You must choose one dependent variable for each set of variables.
• You must produce a base case and optimistic scenario and the necessary explanations for each. Show all your work and exactly how you changed what parameters. You should also show me the hypothesized relationships among your variables for each model. Explain how you think they relate to one another and why.
• Your formal presentation in class must be made using PowerPoint as the primary, though not exclusive, means of displaying your results.
• I also require a hardcopy of your Powerpoint slides and a discussion paper explaining why you did what you did. This should include a discussion of the dependent and independent variables you chose, why you chose them (are they problems for your country or region?) and whether or not you think what changes you made were realistic or not. If they were not realistic, why did you make them? Explain. I expect a few paragraphs for each of the three categories.
• Also in the written assignment, it is required that you show me your models in equation form like we discussed in class. That is, something like X = Y1 + Y2 +... where X is your dependent or problem variable and the Ys are the indepedent variables you are changing to produce solutions to the problems you have identified.
• REMINDERS: Please make sure that you rerun the model each time you change a parameter. Save your changes on disk so that you don’t have to start from scratch each time you work on IFS. I would suggest that you use choose no more than a 30 year time horizon for your project and stick to your choice throughout the project rather than choosing different horizons for different variables. Remember that you may need to reset the counter to the year 2000 when re-running the model.