Wrap up of Week 1

Well done, you have completed the first week of the course. We hope you enjoyed learning with us so far.

You did a lot this week:

• you started with the question why social processes are so hard to predict
• you focussed on the way how micro-behaviours lead to – often unexpected – results on a social level
• we developed a very simple model of how a protest is organised and spreads (or not) and you investigated it step by step
• you’ve explored the following terms: **model, modelling and simulation**
• you experienced how a small change can sometimes lead to a huge change (and sometimes lead to no change at all)
• and you discussed how one model can be useful across different settings

Next week we’ll investigate how the protest would spread if people were influenced by their friends instead of sheer numbers of protesters and this will lead us to the concept of social networks.