Customer Reviews

Adventures in Modeling: Exploring Complex, Dynamic Systems with StarLogo

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This is a great book for anyone interested in modeling dynamic systems. The authors provide wonderful background theory as a basis for building computer simulations. The simple step-by-step instructions guide you through the process of creating your own simulations using StarLogo. This book is an interesting, easily understandable beginner's manual and comes with all the software you need. It's a great way to teach yourself or other people how to program a simulation. I love the turtles!

This book is a great guide to taking the somewhat difficult ideas explored in Mitchel Resnick's book "Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams" and implementing them with students. Adventures in modeling can be used alone but, for any teacher who wants to use this book in a computer class, it is helpful to read the other book first. The activities and challenges here are reasonable for students from college down though middle school. I know of one teacher who has even successfully used these activites with pre-teens.

I am intigued with and have been trying to explore 'emergent behavior' for several months. I am especially enjoying trying to learn and explore with NetLogo. It is the upgraded and much more capable big brother to StarLogo (which this book is about). The main proble that I'm having is that are no printed books that either provide a good reference to the NetLogo lanuage nor any good printed tutorials. I find the electronic versions good but too hard to use...especially while trying to program in NetLogo on the computer.

So I was thinking that this beek looked like a pretty good tutorial on applying StarLogo and, after all, StarLogo is the little brother to NetLogo...so I decided to give it a try. The organization and approach to developing skills with StarLogo are superb and I've enjoyed it a lot. Unfortunately, NetLogo is such an advancement over StarLogo that the StarLogo examples and exercises do not translate well (or at all) to NetLogo. So, in that regard, it was a bust for me.

But if you use (or are interested in getting and using StarLogo) then I highly recommend this book. However, if you're interested in NetLogo,I think you'll likely be disappointed.

This is a great book for people intereted in modeling systems behavior. The authors give an excellent background summary of the theory involved in StarLogo. The program given with the CD is easy to install and use. The book takes you step by step through thinking about and creating your own computer simulation in an easy to understand manner. There's lots of support for any technical difficulties you might have and good examples of what you can do with the program. I highly recommend it to everyone.

This book is so elementary and it must be taught at kindergarden instead of learning something such as a Dynamic Modeling.....

The book is good overall but I felt they need to use more carefully thought out examples and not try to push an 'agenda'.
It is as if the author(s) are trying to make an issue over creation vs evolution. In the very beginning chapter, they make an invalid example by comparing evolution vs creation to central control vs decentralized systems. This is a quote from the book, "This tendency to assume centralized control, which we call the centralized mindset, makes it difficult for people to understand the workings of many phenomena in the world. The recurrent questioning of evolutionary theories is another example: When people see complex living systems in the world, they assume that someone or something must have explicitly designed them; instead, these livings systems are the products of millions of incremental changes over time."