Contents - Cultural View

AgentSheets 18
• Semantical Rewrite Rules: (1994) It became clear that Agent-Based Graphical Rewrite Rules used in
AgentSheets91 and KidSim/Cocoa/Creator were not powerful enough for a number of applications that required
more general pattern. For instance, it was simple to create a rule to make a train follow a straight segment of train
track but the number of rules quickly exploded when trying to have trains follow all combinations of turns and
intersections. Semantic rewrite rules could interpret rules topologically. With a single rule a user could create a
complete train that follows train track behavior.
• Programming by Analogous Examples: (1995) New behavior can be created through analogies. For instance
the behavior of a car can be described as analogy to trains. A car moves on a road like a train on a train track. A
challenge to this approach is conceptual exception handling. Analogies are often either incomplete or too general.
This requires that users can refine programs produced by Programming by Analogous Examples.
• Tactile Programming: (1996) AgentSheets becomes the world's first drag and drop educational programming
environment. Drag and drop interfaces can be used to compose syntactically correct programs. In Visual
AgenTalk (VAT), a rule-based visual programming language, users create rules by dragging and dropping
conditions and actions from palettes. The tactile aspect of Visual AgenTalk allows users to perceive through drag
and drop what programs do. By dragging and dropping conditions, actions, rules and even methods onto agents
they see the consequence of invoking program fragment without having to write a test program. Similar drag and
drop programming can later be found in the Etoys language (part of Squeak), in Alice and in Scratch.
• AgentSheets Inc.: (1996) With the support of the National Science Foundation AgentSheets has become a
commercial product. The programming model has been extended, more interaction modalities have been added
(e.g., speech recognition (Mac)), scientific visualization has been refined (e.g., 3D real time plotting (Mac)), and
AgentSheets has been localized (e.g., Japanese and Greek).
• Scalable Game Design: (2008) A game design based free curriculum covering computational thinking ideas from
elementary to graduate school based on AgentSheets. The mission of Scalable Game Design is to: Reinventing
computer science in public schools by motivating & educating all students including women and
underrepresented communities to learn about computer science through game design starting at the middle school
level. The project is funded by the National Science Foundation.
• Conversational Programming: (2010) AgentSheets 3 is the world first programming environment supporting
computational thinking by providing information about the meaning of the program. Unlike visual programming
approaches, which only help with syntactic challenges, such as avoiding missing semicolons, Conversational
Programming helps with the semantics, that is the meaning of your program. Is this condition true right now?
Would this rule fire? Why does that rule fail? A conversational programming agent will tell all this and more in a
non intrusive kind of way.
See also
• Web based simulation (WBS)
External links
• Middle school students making games after 2 hours (YouTube HD movie) [8]
• AgentSheets papers [9]
• Educational use of AgentSheets in the Edutech Wiki [10]
• AgentSheets Inc [11]
• AgentSheets European Union Project (Greek) [12]