Making and Using Computational Models

You can often find existing computational models and modelling packages.
You can often adapt these models or implement a model in the pacakge.
This can help you understand your particular problem. I find it great when I leave the computer running over night to do some work for me.
You may also want to write your own model or modelling package.
One problem that might arise is that you are the only one using your package. If a whole community is using it, you are in good shape. (One of my supervisors, John Laird, has had an entire, very successful, career based on the Soar cognitive architecture.)
There are often large communities involving standard simulation packages, and by using them, you can rather easily join that community.
Writing the program for the model can help you understand your model. It makes you make implicit assumptions explicit.
If you're not good at programming, you might want to try some simple models first.