The best place to learn Stella is at the computer. You will discover that the software is easy to learn and easy to use. This appendix provides some simple examples which you should try to reproduce on your computer. Stella is well documented in Getting Started booklets and Technical Documentation available from High Performance Systems, Inc. (HPS 1993, 1995). The Stella software is also nicely described by Hannon and Ruth (1994), Few (1996) and Soltzberg (1996).

Population Example

Figure C.1 shows a Stella flow diagram of a simple model of a population that grows due to the accumulated effect of births. The stock is the "Human Population." The flow is "Births." The "Birth Rate" is a converter.

Figure C.1. Stella flow diagram of a population model. This is a "screen capture" of a Macintosh monitor with comments added in italics.