NetLogo is the “Gears of my Adulthood” — yeah, all you Papert fans know what I’m alluding to, it’s a riff off his Foreword to Mindstorms. But, really, when I first arrived to Northwestern University as a graduate student, I didn’t know the difference between a turtle and a tortoise, or LEGO and Logo, and I still secretly hoped that this ‘agent’ thing is something secret like James Bond.
I was fortunate to be inducted into all things NetLogo at the Center for Connected Learning and Computer-Based Modeling, where I became a Postdoctoral Fellow under Uri Wilensky’s supervision. My “day job” was to co-lead field work examining middle-school kids’ learning about levels thinking through playing HubNet multiplayer games for networked classrooms (oh the miles of ethernet cables before the age of robust wifi….). Ok, if you know me, you realize that was my night job, too, once we got the data.
But NetLogo was to change the course of my career through its big ideas of complexity, emergence, and levels. Systemic thinking has ever since been my secret sauce, my party trick, and my conceptual entry point into dynamic system theory, which has proved vital for my empirical investigations into the enactive grounds of conceptual learning . Some years later, well, in 2020, I wrote this chapter about the historical intellectual journey (see the recent “Designing constructionist futures” book).
NetLogo was also the digital hub of my design-based research into how children make sense of probability — this resulted in ProbLab, a set of curricular models that I used in my work with kids, such as “Dice Stalagmites” , where you can explore why rolling a 7 with two dice is the most likely event, even though each die is equally likely to fall on any of its six sides. This project ultimately earned me tenure at Berkeley.
Oh, and then one day I taught NetLogo to my kid, and this little turtle programmed the agents to perform her favorite folk dance. Sometimes I think my life is running a genetic algorithm.
Forward 7!
- Dor.