PursueSTEM is an outreach student providing STEM workshops to students of African descent in the Greater Toronto Area. Nearly 40 high school students have been taking part in science workshops provided by science departments in the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Arts & Science. The program was developed by the Department of Physics and the University's Office of Student Recruitment and the Lifelong Leadership Institute’s Leadership by Design program.

Dr. Brad Bass, the Director of the COBWEB Program, and a Status Professor in the Faculty's School of the Environment led a workshop with students from the Faculty's Research Opportunity Program and students from the COBWEB Program. The workshop exposed PursueSTEM students to the basics of COBWEB and to a number of different research projects from both the sciences and social sciences. PursueSTEM students were given an opportunity to see how they could manipulate COBWEB parameters in developing an experiment and several opportunities to speak with student modellers during the event

For many years students, under the supervision of Dr. Brad Bass, have conducted research projects on topics ranging the full span of the STEAM spectrum using COBWEB. To those of you hearing about it for the first time, COBWEB is an agent-based simulation model, meaning that the actions of each member of a population or component of a system can be represented in the model. Each member of the population can learn, and populations/systems can evolve novel strategies over time. COBWEB was originally designed to model the occurrence of events that are difficult to predict, thus it is very useful in assessing the long-term response of a system to an external change or the impact of the system’s internal dynamics on the long-term system behaviour … AND a great opportunity for students to engage in research!🤓📈