5/11/2023 0 Comments Netlogo examples![]() Instead, our strategy is to insert complexity and modeling into a variety of courses as a new perspective for approaching the material. A curriculum for teaching complex systems doesn't have to do so by directly hitting the students over the head with the systems thinking concepts. Fortunately, we now have an understanding of how to do that. Computation has gotten so powerful that it can allow us to imagine, analyze, and explore phenomena that we just couldn't do before. Wilensky: We are at a major inflection point. For example, in Chicago, we work with the Department of Public Health to test various strategies for dealing with infections in the most cost-effective way, to inform public health policies.īrodsky: How would you communicate the urgency of introducing new ways of teaching complexity? In addition to education, which is our main mission, we also conduct scientific (theoretical and applied) research. We've been working hard to put more social science scenarios into our units, such as cooperation, conflict resolution, ethnocentrism, voting, housing segregation, urban sprawl, taxation systems, and more. However, it takes a little more work to recruit social science teachers. Wilensky: In fact, I find the social sciences to be the most exciting areas of growth. It is important to recognize that our intuitions about complex systems are often misleading.īrodsky: Is NetLogo mostly used for natural sciences, or can it be applied to social sciences and politics? This is an example of a critical parameter that causes the system to reach a “tipping point”, common in complex systems. Most of the time, our unaided intuition would suggest that a small change of density should lead only to a bit more burn. But if I raise the density to 63%, the whole forest burns. At 57% density, too, the picture will be similar. If we run the model at 50% forest density, we'll see the fire will die out soon. If it sees a burning tree next to it, it ignites. In the model, an unburned tree looks to the north, to the east, to the south, and the west. Take a forest wildfire model, for example, represented from a perspective of a tree. ![]() Wilensky: NetLogo helps students to visualize non-intuitive, complex systems. Our new agent-based educational tools, such as NetLogo, introduce complexity to everyone, from preschoolers to college students to working scientists.īrodsky: Could you provide an example of how NetLogo is used? Those simple rules lead to the emergence of the system’s behaviors. Each agent has a simple set of rules describing its goals, actions, and responses to other agents. The core idea behind agent-based modeling is that almost every situation involves interactions of individual actors called agents (atoms, trees, cars, viruses, people, animals, etc). As I was interested in how patterns arise in the world from an early age, I spent much of my academic life working on the representations of complexity and concluded that one of the most promising ways to do so is through agent-based models. Many educators nowadays say it is very difficult for a human brain to understand emergent, non-linear processes.
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