I can’t add a lot of commentary to this post without showcasing my ignorance in computer programming, so I’m just going to let you know about these two programs from MIT and Northwestern. You might want to check them out if you have students who need to learn computer programming or if you just want to know why birds flock like they do*.
(The following description are taken from their sites):
NetLogo is a cross-platform multi-agent programmable modeling
environment.
StarLogo is a
programmable modeling environment for exploring the workings of
decentralized systems — systems that are organized without an
organizer, coordinated without a coordinator. With StarLogo, you can
model (and gain insights into) many real-life phenomena, such as *bird
flocks, traffic jams, ant colonies, and market economies.
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Great find! We’ve been using the Scratch program from MIT (thanks to your recommendation), and are going to “graduate” to StarLogo. They seem to have similar interfaces, so we’ll see how it goes.
Thank you for your helpful posts!