TME 3513 - Introduction to Systems Thinking Guide Ask Us

Welcome to the course guide for TME 3513! This guide is designed to support your success in TME 3513, and in preparing to participate in the Map the System Competition. This guide was written and maintained by librarian Cat Gracey, in collaboration with Dr. Kush Bubbar. If you have any questions about this content, or you are interested in a research consult, please reach out to Cat via email, or use the booking link under the photo on the right side of the page.

To find up to date information about assignments and assessment, please refer to your D2L page for this course. For information about the Map the System Competition, see links to the competition information below:

• Map the System Homepage
• Student Guide to Mapping the System
• Frequently Asked Questions for Students
• Student Resources - Includes information about upcoming workshops, and worksheets/resources to help guide you through this process
• Submission Guidelines - While this information pertains to competition submissions, it is what your assignment guidelines are based on
• Past Finalist Submissions - In 2024, a group from this course was among the top 6 teams who presented at the Canadian finals. You can see the finalists' Analyses, Systems Maps, Bibliographies and Presentations from 2017-2024 at this link.

Zotero

To store, organize and then properly acknowledge your sources, you are expected to use the reference management tool Zotero. This tool allows you to both manually upload, and save resources from the web, and then organize these resources into collections. You can also take notes, or highlight certain sections of articles, and apply tags to resources to help filter and sort through a large library. Zotero is free to use, and integrates with your browser, and word processor so it can generate in-text references and bibliographies in hundreds of different citation styles.

For the purposes of this course, you are expected to use IEEE style. You are also expected to pull from a wide variety of sources, including academic articles, podcasts, interviews and more. This will likely result in a large number of sources and Zotero will allow you to store and organize these.

For more information, review the UNB Libraries Guide for Zotero.

Writing Centre

For support in editing your work, clarifying the tone of your writing or trying to articulate a difficult concept, consider visiting the Writing Centre. You can make a one-on-one appointment with a writing specialist, in which they'll review your work and give you feedback. If you don't need to make an appointment at this time, you could still also benefit from some of their resources on writing.

In working to better understand complex systems and wicked problems, it is essential to gather a wide variety of information resources. You'll want to gather information from and about different stakeholders, including academic, government, legal, industry and civilian perspectives. To achieve this cross disciplinary perspective, you'll want to search for information in a number of different places.

Aim to collect information from a wide variety of sources, including blog posts, book chapters/books, journal articles, news articles, and reports.

Multidisciplinary Academic Databases

Statistics and Market Research

Education

Political Science

Law

Healthcare

Indigenous Peoples

The Environment

International Development

Getting Started

For your major project in this course, you will need to put together a poster to present the information, research, and insights you've compiled on your chosen complex systems over the semester. To create your best poster, consider:

1. Who is your audience? What information would they understand and where would they need more context? It's key to avoid using lingo or acronyms that they wouldn't know, without first defining them.
2. What is the key information I'm trying to get across? Is there a key finding, or area that needs to be further explored? Keep in mind that you're trying to tell your audience a story, and engage them.
3. How is each piece of information best represented? Would something be explained better in bullet points or a graph? Utilize your judgement to present information in different, and engaging ways.
4. What is required to be on my poster according to the assignment instructions and rubric? Once you have all the required components accounted for, you can get creative with what else you include, and how information is presented.

This is an opportunity to engage with the UNB community and share your knowledge. This video on making a better poster discusses the elements of knowledge translation, and evidence-based ways to engage your audience. While it specifically focuses on scientific research posters, most of these lessons are valuable for your purposes as well.

Poster Design

In addition to overall poster concept and design, it's important to ensure your works are readable, and adhere to accessibility best practices.

Colour

Even if you're not an artist or graphic designer, you can still likely tell when colours go together well, and when they do not. It can be distracting for your poster session participants if your colours are not in harmony. Consider putting together a colour pallet to use throughout your poster using a free tool like Adobe Colour. Using Adobe Colour, you can search for colour pallets that fit a certain theme, or upload an image you'll be using in the poster, and it will generate a colour palate based on this.

You'll also want to ensure you have sufficient contrast so that your audience can read the text, and don't have any issues making it out.

• Colour Contrast Checker - Ensure that your colour contrast choices adhere to Web Content Accessibility Guidelines
• Which Colour Converts the Best? - Learn about the emotions each colour envokes for viewers, and how to combine colours effectively and with accessibility in mind

Font

Text is a primary way that you'll be presenting information, and so it's crucial that you're intentional about your font choice. Typically, your poster should be able to be read from approximately 5 feet away, so that people don't have to approach the poster all the way to be able to gather information. Some best practices include picking one or two fonts to use throughout your poster, using sans serif fonts (click below links to learn more about these), and utilizing font size, bolding and italics to differentiate between titles, headings, subheadings and body text.

• How to Choose Appropriate Font Sizes for Your Scientific Poster

• Which Fonts to Use on Your Scientific Poster

Other Sources

• Creating Effective Posters
• How to Create a Better Research Poster
• Tips on Creating a Conference Poster

• How to Design an Award-Winning Scientific Conference Poster

Software for Creating Posters

To actually make your posters, you should use software that is equipped to incorporate text and visual elements into a poster, and which you can export as a PDF. There is a TME PowerPoint template that you will be asked to use.

• How to Create a Poster in PowerPoint
• How to Create a Research Poster in PowerPoint

It is critical for you to be able to adjust the dimensions of the poster to fit the size of the eventual printed poster. Check the size of the poster you are meant to be printing, and set this as your size in your document so that when you print it, everything is the appropriate size.

Printing Posters

There are multiple places on campus where you can print your posters. Ensure that you read the information about printing carefully to ensure that you submit your poster with enough time to print, and that you submit the correct document type.

• UNB Print Services
• Printing at UNB Libraries