If you are familiar with rivers in the west, you can probably guess that The Idagon is an adaptation of the Snake and Columbia River system in the Pacific Northwest. For example, the "Canadian River" corresponds to the Columbia River, and the flow at "Big Springs," corresponds to the aquifer discharge in the Thousand Springs area of southern Idaho.

The Idagon was developed after a group experiment with "The Snake River Explorer." The Snake River model was designed for professionals with direct responsibility and vested interest in the management of the Snake River system. They met in 1995 in a workshop in Boise, Idaho to experiment with the model. Their findings are reported in "Testing the Snake River Explorer" in the Winter, 1996 issue of the System Dynamics Review.

The participants recommended that we pursue the development of a river model for classroom use. They suggested that we work with a hypothetical river so participants could focus on the simulated dynamics. The Idagon was originally developed with the MicroWorlds software (Diehl 1994) in 1996, and has been "student tested" in environmental science classes at WSU during 1997-1999. It was transferred to Stella for easier use by students and teachers using Modeling the Environment.