Undergraduate Module on Computational Modeling: Introducing Modeling the Cane Toad Invasion
Angela B. Shiflet, George W. Shiflet, Whitney E. Sanders · Procedia Computer Science · 2013
“Modeling an ‘Able’ Invader—the ‘Cane’ Toad” is an educational computational science module developed by the authors for the NSF funded Blue Waters Undergraduate Petascale Education Program. The module considers the fundamentals of a grid-based individual-based simulation and develops such a model for an invasive species, the cane toad, to study the effect of fencing artificial water points on the adult's invasion. Besides serial implementations in MATLAB and C, a parallel program in C/MPI accompanies the module. Moreover, the module considers a serial algorithm and an approach to parallelizing, speedup, and scalability. This paper describes the module and details experiences using the material in an undergraduate course on Modeling Biological Networks at Wofford College.