Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams: Explorations in Massively Parallel Microworlds

Resnick (media laboratory Massachusetts Institute of Technology) explores the counterintuitive world of decentralized systems and self-organizing phenomena. Drawing on ideas from computer science education psychology and systems theory he examines why many people resist decentralized ideas and describes an innovative computer language StarLogo that he designed to help students from grade school and up simulate self-organizing behavior in systems. Resnick analyzes the educational ideas such as constructionism and computational ideas including massive parallelism underlying StarLogo. Annotation copyright Book News Inc. Portland Or.