A very pretty intro to causal loop diagrams for school children

I ran across this very nice piece of work introducing basic Systems Dynamics and Causal Loop Diagramming for pre-college students or any introductory class.

It caught my attention because the "ladder" on the first graphic is certainly a more approachable way of showing part of what I was trying to show.

And take a look at the "ladder diagram" in this classroom handout pdf instead for a starting point. ( In turn that was taken from Senge's the Fifth Discipline Fieldbook).
Introduction to Systems Concepts and Tools
by Julie Guerrero, Mike Slootmaker, and Joan Yates
From the Catalina Foothills School Project.

If you tip that ladder over to the left side, it describes what I was trying to put on my bottom row, mostly. More precisely, that ladder is the part of my BIG PICTURE diagram that I highlighted in this next graphic:



I just went into a lot more detail, showing the internal workings of "action" and also some internal workings of "the world".

Maybe that will help.

All of these are just different levels of detail on the single core "cybernetic" loop, of seeing, reflecting, acting, and having the world respond, followed by seeing that, reflecting on that, taking action, having the world resond to that, followed by seeing, etc.

Here's Wikipedia's introduction to "cybernetics" for those who want to access the literature.

Cybernetics is the study of feedback and derived concepts such as communication and control in living organisms, machines and organisations. The term cybernetics stems from the Greek Κυβερνήτης (kybernetes, steersman, governor, pilot, or rudder — the same root as government). It is an earlier but still-used generic term for many of the subject matters that are increasingly subject to specialization under the headings of adaptive systems, artificial intelligence, complex systems, complexity theory, control systems, decision support systems, dynamical systems, information theory, learning organizations, mathematical systems theory, operations research, simulation, and systems engineering.