This program puts you in charge of raising fish in a pond. You are the manager of the farm, and you need to figure out how best to raise the fish to maximize your profit. You can control a variety of factors including how densely you initially stock the fish, how much protein you put in the fish food, the rate at which you turn over the water, how much you aerate the water, and so on. Your job is to experiment with these different variables to find the optimal way to raise fish in your farm. The program lets you change each variable separately, make a run with that setting, and then gives you a summary of how you did in that run. As the model runs, it shows you various statistics on the screen telling you how well you are doing. The program will also take the data from several experiments and make graphs of profit versus different values of one of the variables.

This program is quite engaging, and really makes you think about how to go about finding out an answer to a question which depends on many variables. For instance, you will have trouble finding the optimal fish growing method if you do not change one variable at a time. The user interface is quite clear and easy to use. Everything is done through buttons and dialog boxes where you can type in numbers, and all the information you need is on the screen. The one annoying thing about the interface is that to go from one experiment to the next you must traverse four or five dialog boxes which gets tiresome after a while. However, other than that minor complaint, this program is quite nice.

Computer: Macintosh

Source: Benjamin/Cummings Publishing Company, ??

Cost: Low?

Last update 22nd of January 1996