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Shodor Scholars Program 2009
Shodor > SUCCEED > Workshops > Archive > Shodor Scholars Program 2009

Today, the students began studying Netlogo. The instructor explained that Netlogo is an agent modeling software like AgentSheets. This means that the "characters" involved with the model are given attributes and behaviors that reflect factors that influence the model. For instance, in the disease epidemic model, the agents were infected people, recovered people, immune people and healthy people.

After the break, the students continued learning about Netlogo basics. The students copied code from the overhead while the instructor made frequent pauses to explain new ideas. They became familiar with vocabulary such as "time step" and "turtles" (what the agents are called in Netlogo). The students added variables to the code and inserted slider bars for initial population and recovery rate to the interface of Netlogo. Afterwards, the students spent time creating counters that would display the percentage of sick and healthy people.

In the afternoon, the students worked on an SIR NetLogo model. In this model, they had four types of "turtles" (the NetLogo term for agents): susceptible, infected, recovered, and doctor. The disease spread through the population through the interaction of susceptible turtles with infected turtles. The infected turtles became recovered turtles by interacting with the doctors. Students learned how to create models in NetLogo and used the basic skills they learned to create and improve upon complex models.

During the second half of the class, students learned about Java. They began by learning that NetLogo, a program they had already used, actually created Java programs to carry out their models. They learned that one of the things that makes Java powerful and useful is that it can be run on multiple operating systems. They learned about the trade-off involved with using Java over using NetLogo: time, and level of complexity. You can create more complex models in Java, but it requires more time. NetLogo models can be created more quickly, and with much less code, but are much less complex.