Software is a technology tool, and through the history of mankind, tools are most recent technology have changed our cognitive skills and developed our intelligence. Water resources specialists deal with numerical simulations of surface flow, groundwater flow, interaction with the environment and prediction of future impacts with an extensive use of software and computers. In our point of view, there is a need of professionals that can deal with many types of software and programming codes to develop comprehensive evaluations of the current and future conditions of the water resources.

It is not about knowledge, it is about the experience

Knowledge is available everywhere; in water resources we have plenty of open source software available online with manuals and examples. But, why there isn’t a significantly increment of the professionals with strong skills on these softwares? Maybe because we haven’t thought on the process of presenting software to the student that is essentially an experience, similar when you try a new type of food, when you buy clothes or when you knew people.

As long as software is made by humans not by aliens, anyone can learn a software on their own by reading the documentation or going through the tutorials, but we have to assess how many people are really willing to spend this amount of time, and how many people drop that effort in the first week or month.

An heterogenous media

In teaching groundwater modeling software that is an area we know well, the main challenge comes from the variety and heterogeneity of student backgrounds, student expectations and if we couple with the geospatial student distribution we face that every introductory course we give will fall short in some aspects for some students.

From the last course we gave on introduction to groundwater modeling with MODFLOW, we realized that the effort on this course was much higher that in our advanced courses that has more sessions and more hours per session because we knew that groundwater modeling was a new topic for student and we were focused to provide a first great experience.

The concept of “first great experience”

After long discussion, instead of bringing comprehensive introductory material we have developed the concept of “first great experience” in groundwater modeling.

This concept isn’t intended to cover applied, multi-featured exercises using machine learning tools with amazing outputs. The concept is to develop on a first session a simple exercise that somehow show the software workflow, achieving results that can be represented and analyzed not only by the teacher, but by every student. If we achieve this on the first experience, by sure the rate of student that enroll in future courses, develop thesis based on software or use software for professional purpose will increase notably.

Once we achieve a first great experience as our standard, we will face another challenges as the “great long term experience” but we will be ready to respond if share the same goals.