One of good approaches is to make a kind of game and let students participate in it. Our experience in U-Mart (See our book: Artificial Market Experiments with the U-Mart System, Y. Shiozawa, and others, 2008, Springer Verlag Tokyo) tells us that most of students become involved in the game as if they are participating as a day-trader in the futures markets. After one or two sessions of this kind of game, some students (we cannot say all but major part of them) become interested in making computer program of a machine agent (a computer program which plays a series of transactions according to a technical analysis). If the students have a good experience in programming, they may start to program a server system. In this way most students start to be interested in social computing and become eager to do a research by making his/her own agent-based simulation.

I'm a PhD student at George Mason's Computational Social Science department, first dedicated department in the US. Yes, finding students with strengths in multiple disciplines isn't easy, esp. since there are so many incentives to "stove pipe". But they are out there, often on the fringes of the academic and professional world because they don't "fit the mold". Best way to find them is to create a "honey pot" to attract them.

I'll second Yoshinori Shiozawa's idea of hosting participatory games. For business students, the Beer Game is a good choice, and has been used for decades. For social science students, there are nice examples in the NetLogo library that could be set up as network games. I'd guess that there are also artificial stock market games that could arouse interest.

But here's a different angle: Find some pressing economic problem that is specific to your region and your country and that calls out for a computational approach. Then organize a workshop with local business and government officials who can talk about it and make it vivid. Invite guest speakers who are well-known in Computational Social Science and have them lead panel discussions or breakout sessions on how the problems might be framed using computational methods. IDEALLY, you'd find some sponsor to put up money to fund a project, or even a contest prize (~$3,000 US would be enough) and then have a second workshop in 6 months to show off team results.

Thanks Yoshi and Russell! Both excellent ideas. I especially like yours, Russell. (I think this one can really enhance our interdisciplinary connections at the same time!) Thanks guys!

Here are some ideas may work:

I think targeting new market will be a good idea especially student from developing countries. Those students are eager to learn because they did not have this knowledge back at their home countries and some of them ventures to to multi-disciplinary topics to find job.

Show the students how technology will help them do the job faster and accurately. Make the examples relative to their original disciple e.g computation for journalists ...

kindest regards.

One of our aims of starting the U-MART project is to find a way to reduce the market running cost. In a developed country, there are many companies quoted in stock market.

The cost that a company must burden is small. Less developed countries have few of companies which is suitable to be quoted in a stock market. Then the cost that a company must burden is large. This causes an apparent vicious cycle, for less developed countries have smaller chance to open a stock market and this blocks the chance to enhance new companies to give birth and grow.

If a stock market can be run by a smaller cost, we may open a new market where there are fewer participants to the market. This may open a new chance to countries which have only a thin market.

I am a lecturer in Computer Science. I developed a MSc module called "Simulation for Decision Support" and through my teaching efforts I meet lots of interesting students with different backgrounds who enjoy the generic topic of systems simulation and want to do their MSc dissertation project with me.

Usually I can convince them that it is interesting to work on an ABM topic (my own research interest is in human behaviour modelling). Through this channel I also found two high quality PhD students who now work on topics related to ABM.

So I think this is a good alternative to what has been mentioned before. It is a lot of effort in the first place, but I think it has paid off. I enjoy discussing my research topics with my students and seeing how they get more and more excited about it :).

Here is a link to the module website:

http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~pos/g54sim/2012-2013/index.html

Thanks for the sharing of your experiences, I also teach with masteral and phd students in some Universities in West Africa and I find an interactive and participatory games relevant to their conditions very helpful. Simple games are particularly attractive to local farmers in Africa and Asia which I derived simple rules for the simulation. But what I learnt from my experience is that you need to be creative that you give several choices according to their interest, though honestly very challenging.

thanks for sharing, i do teach MBA students here in India,I will teach them interestingly because before i start teaching them , let me learn the subject through and go to them with full confidence and teach them with interesting facts and figures by quoting more examples ( the examples would be more of things which are happening around them.Easy ya.

By highlighting the fact that simulations are occurring all around them, more so with the mediated technology we use to disguise and to veil interactions- almost an "avatar-ization" of the world. I really hope this word will be the next buzzword for the sake of our students who know it instinctively but would nonetheless have to contend with the textbook principles in order to gain this insight. The dire need therefore is not for more mature students with all-rounded experience but for more imaginative students.

To quote Albert Einstein (who had frequent flights of imagination):

“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand."