I don't know exactly what kind of certificate bcgospel is doing it for, but for me this same module was a part of a course called 'introduction quantitative agro ecology', a first year course as part of the bachelor plant sciences.
this is basically an intro course to computer modeling. the gap between model and reality was also part of the lectures. in later years there are some follow-up courses, for example a course 'Systems Analysis, Simulation and Systems Management', which I thought was pretty though, that included for example modelling the foraging behaviour of predators(used as biological control), or modeling the spread of a pest trough a field(which used some vague mathematical stuff like 'dispersal kernels', which I still don't really understand).
and another later year course which also kind of went into this direction, but less complex modeling, was a course called crop ecology, which dealt more with greenhouse management(simulating how much you have to for example open the windows on a certain day to keep temp+co2 optimal inside, etc), and it including doing calculations with temperature sum/degreedays(if you're not familiar with it, degreedays is a unit used for development time, so you can calculate how long it takes for a certain crop to develop to the point of harvest and stuff around that, but since development speed is dependent on temperature, the unit 'degreedays' is used)
personally modeling isn't really my thing either(or math in general), but I can see the uses for it. I just rather have someone else does it instead of me.
it's not a direction I want to continue in. I'm usually not the best student in the area of attendance(which caused most of my failed courses, since there are a lot of mandatory lab practicals), but I usually don't struggle much with the material itself. but that systems analysis/management/etc course was one of the few courses where I did struggle, first time I followed it I quit 2 weeks in because the math was just way too complicated(2nd time I managed to pass).
my study also has a lot of courses that are more fun though. including plenty of experiments where we use actual plants(or insects) instead of computersimulations. although, I do know remember one non-simulation hellish practical, we had to test preference of a parasitoid wasp for eggs of 2 butterflyspecies.
so first you had to arrange these eggs in a grid pattern. 16 eggs, 2 mm apart, on top of a piece of paper. every time you touched the paper, exhaled onto it, etc, all eggs where out of order. then we had to select female wasps, we had to look at the antenae under a microscope. but these damn bugs kept runnning around their testtube, running faster up and down than I could focus the microscope. then we had to repeat it 10 times, so every time you had to replace the egg that the wasp laid an egg in, and the eggs scattering everywhere began all over again. eventually after 5 times we were fed up, and we pooled our data together with another group that had 5 observations too.
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