AgentSheets
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| Paradigm | object-oriented, educational, Conversational Programming |
|---|---|
| Designed by | Alexander Repenning |
| First appeared | 1991 |
| Stable release |
4.0 / 19 May 2014
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| Platform | JVM |
| License | proprietary |
| Website | www |
| Influenced by | |
| Lisp, Logo, Smalltalk | |
| Influenced | |
| Etoys, Scratch | |
AgentSheets is a Cyberlearning tool to teach students programming and related information technology skills through game design.
The results of the NSF ITEST program supported research investigating motivational and educational aspects of introducing computer science at the middle school level are extremely positive in terms of motivational levels, number of participants and participation of women and underrepresented communities. The participation is extremely high because most middle schools participating in the study have made Scalable Game Design a module that is part of existing required courses (e.g., computer power with keyboarding and power point). Many of the middle schools instruct all of their students in scalable game design reaching in some schools over 900 students per year, per school. Of the well over 1000 students participating in the project in the first semester over 52% were girls. Of the girls 85% enjoyed the scalable game design course and 78% would like to take another game design course.
The built-in drag-and-drop language is accessible enough that students without programming background can make their own simple Frogger-like game, and publish it on the Web, in their first session. At the same time, AgentSheets is powerful enough to make sophisticated The Sims-like games with artificial intelligence. To transition from visual programming to more traditional programming students can render their games into Java source code.
Similar to a spreadsheet, an agentsheet is a computational grid. Unlike spreadsheets, this grid does not just contain numbers and strings but so called agents. These agents are represented by pictures, can be animated, make sounds, react to mouse/keyboard interactions, can read web pages, can speak and even recognize speech commands (Mac). This grid is well suited to build computational science applications modeling complex scientific phenomena with up to tens of thousands of agents. The grid is useful to build agent-based simulations including cellular automata or diffusion-based models. These models are used in a wide variety of applications. How does a mudslide work? When does a bridge collapse? How fragile are ecosystems? This ability to support game as well as computational science applications with the inclusion of scientific visualizations makes AgentSheets a unique computational thinking tool that is used computer science and STEM education.
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