At the start of the Modeling Your World workshop today, Levi reintroduced the "Rabbits and Wolves" model to the students. Upon showing them the model, he converted the simulation into paragraph form: "Rabbits run around randomly. Wolves eat the rabbits..." Writing down exactly what was happening in the model allowed the students to realize that the visual aspects of the model could be represented in more than one way. Next, the class went through and labeled all the nouns, verbs, and adjectives in the sentence. Each of the words corresponded to a specific term for agent-based models (specifically those found in AgentSheets). In agent-based models, nouns represent agents, verbs represent behaviors, and adjectives represent depictions. The process of labeling the sentences was helpful when the students were creating their own model.
The class decided to construct a model that simulated a zombie apocalypse. As a group, they wrote out a story that detailed exactly what each of the agents would be doing at any specific time. After going through and labeling the story as they had with the "Rabbits and Wolves" model, they then set to work on building it in AgentSheets under the direction of Levi. As Levi went through and taught them how to construct a model in AgentSheets, he would continually reference the story written on the board. He went through sentence-by-sentence and asked the students to create the agent, edit the depiction, and adjust the behavior. By the end of the workshop, the whole group was mostly comfortable creating models and many were even experimenting adding multiple agents to the worksheet and manipulating variables.