Loopy

One of the things I always stressed in facilitating history instruction involved teaching students to think about how history helps us understand why things are the way they are today, and how it can continue to shape the future.  I always enjoyed helping kids make those connections between a series of past events leading into present day.

Since moving into evaluation, I've been finding that evaluators call this process 'logic modeling' - basically the process of mapping out the different possibilities that might happen given the introduction of a certain program, service, etc.

Enter Loopy.  I first saw this from a tweet from Edublogs, via Larry Ferlazzo.  As an open-source platform (you can access the code in GitHub), it's free to use and allows students to generate their own 'logic models': mapping out how one event might lead to another.  This sample, for example, looks at automation and what some of the outcomes might be.  It's a basic model, but would be something students could use to generate ideas on any number of historical scenarios.

Looks like it's part of a larger collaborative called Explorable Explanations - something I'll be exploring over the weeks to come.