Emergence: An Illustration of the Concept for Education of Young Students Timothy L.J. Ferris Systems Engineering and Evaluation Centre University of South Australia, Australia Abstract. The concept of emergence in systems is a difficult concept for beginners in the analysis of systems to appreciate. The essence of the emergence concept is that when a set of components are brought together and assembled into a system, that system exhibits properties that are different than the aggregation of the properties of the components taken separately. Systems educators have, amongst other roles, the task of providing students with an intuitive sense of the nature of the emergence phenomenon. This paper discusses the use of tennis, a sport with a hierarchical scoring structure, as an illustration of the nature and characteristics of emergence in systems. INTRODUCTION It is well known by Systems Engineers that systems behave in a manner that is different than the mere combination of properties of the parts of the system. As a trivial example, any simple product exhibits behaviour that is different than the behaviour that would be exhibited by pieces of the same materials in the same shapes, if they were collected together, but not assembled into the finished product. This effect is described as the property of emergence of properties in systems. The observation of emergence is so well known that expression of the concept is often reduced to platitudinous comments of the order of “the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.” It may be meaningful for Systems Engineers, who are familiar with the concept of emergence to roll out such platitudes as a means of reminding each other of an error in recognising the emergent properties, or the likely emergence of properties, in some particular system. It is an altogether different problem to consider how to introduce the concept of emergence in other than a superficial heuristic manner to beginners in Systems Engineering. A beginner in Systems Engineering is likely to be a student, probably of another engineering discipline, who is taking a first undergraduate course in Systems Engineering. Such students would benefit from a carefully prepared example that would illustrate for them, preferably at a variety of levels, the characteristics of emergence in systems. Such an illustrative example would present them with a means to understand the abstract concept of emergence by linking it to the concrete nature of the case example of the illustration. However, the illustration used must be carefully considered to avoid the risk that the illustration, itself, becomes a stumbling block in the students’ advance towards understanding of the concept of emergence in systems. APPROACHES TO PRESENTING EMERGENCE One approach to describing emergence that may be used in undergraduate education is to point out that in the process of design of any system, including the simplest imaginable products, the purpose of design is to generate a specification of the product to be delivered that will have