In The Shape of Change, by Rob Quaden, Alan Ticotsky and Debra Lyneis, students engaged in games and other classroom activities to observe what was changing over time. They drew behavior over time graphs to examine how these things changed, and they related the patterns of behavior to other changes in their experience.

Now, with The Shape of Change: Stocks and Flows students build on the earlier lessons to understand why the changes occurred. Why did doubling cause the number of friends to grow exponentially? Why did the mammoths go extinct? Why did the boiling water cool to room temperature?

Step-by-step, students build stock/flow maps explaining each lesson activity. These stock/flow maps are tied directly to students’ earlier behavior over time graphs and to the underlying causal loop structures that drive the changes. That way, students begin to build systems thinking skills – an understanding of how structure creates the behavior we observe all around us.

Introduction to the combined edition of The Shape of Change and The Shape of Change: Stocks and Flows.

This book is a combined edition of two books, The Shape of Change and The Shape of Change: Stocks and Flows. We have found that over the two years that The Shape of Change: Stocks and Flows has been available, more and more people are buying both books. This was to be expected, since the necessary pre-requisites for using the lessons in The Shape of Change: Stocks and Flows are the games and lessons presented in The Shape of Change. Having them printed in one volume is not only more convenient, but also more cost effective, both for the publisher and the purchaser. This edition is literally the two books put together in the same volume with nothing added or subtracted. As such, the lessons in the original book The Shape of Change still can be used as stand-alone lessons without their follow-up in The Shape of Change: Stocks and Flows.

The Shape of Change: Stocks and Flows begins immediately following page 145 in The Shape of Change.