Tortuga: Building Interactive Scaffolds for Agent-based Modeling and Programming in NetLogo.
Published in Proceedings of ISLS Annual Meeting, 2023
Summary
Agent-based Modeling and Programming (ABM & P) is widely used in educational settings to promote computational thinking and complex systems thinking. In this paper, we introduce Tortuga, a novel technical system for building interactive scaffolds for ABM & P. Tortuga lowers the threshold and raises the ceiling for constructionist curricular designers. It allows designers to build interactive scaffolds with simple NetLogo commands. These scaffolds can be aware of computational models’ emergent behaviors and can react to learners’ interactions in modeling spaces. We introduce its technical structure and start to explore how that structure supports learning designs. To understand Tortuga’s design affordances, we implemented three types of interactive scaffolds for eight NetLogo models in out-of-school, online learning contexts. Our preliminary quantitative analysis points to potential benefits of content-specific and programming-oriented scaffolds to engage learners with ABM & P.
Recommended citation: Chen, J., Horn, M. S., & Wilensky, U. J. (2023b). Tortuga: Building Interactive Scaffolds for Agent-based Modeling and Programming in NetLogo. Proceedings of ISLS Annual Meeting 2023.
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