I just spent two days in Tucson at the Waters Foundation (http://www.watersfoundation.org) training for teachers in the Catalina Foothills Unified School District. They started with an interesting exercise of having each person in a circle establish a random relationship with two other people in the circle and then always remain equidistant from those two people. It was interesting to see the chaos at the beginning transform into a relatively stable structure.
The relationships were analogous to systems control mechanisms and when a person you were linked to was linked to someone else who was linked to you, there was feedback that demonstrated how changes rippled through the system.
There were other lessons and coverage of terms and techniques leading to the use of Stella for modeling dynamic relationships. There is a book, "Modeling the Environment" by Ford which covers much of what they do. But it is intriguing to see that they are teaching elementary children to think and experience systems dynamics.
Another modeling program is available called "Vensim" from http://www.vensim.com
