Don't Take My Word For It: Students' Thoughts On Agent-Based Modeling

LUKE S. PREMO

This special issue provides a welcomed opportunity to share and reflect upon what my students have told me they have gained from learning agent-based modeling. I hope this essay is useful to researchers who are interested in agent-based modeling but remain unclear about what it entails and what they can expect in return for their investment of time and effort. The Student Becomes the Teacher I have been teaching agent-based modeling to graduate students since 2005. I have taught my course at universities as well as at a Max Planck Institute. Students have come from a range of disciplines including archaeology, evolutionary biology, ecology, primatology, and paleoanthropology. The course involves many hours of programming in NetLogo (Wilensky 1999). The final project requires that students analyze and then report on an agent-based model they created during the semester. I often ask students a simple and purposefully open-ended question: What was the most important or surprising thing you learned in this course? I am not too proud to say that I find their answers illuminating. Some students highlight aspects of modeling to which I had not given sufficient thought. Others explain how concepts like emergence and complexity provide the opportunity to reconsider their own research questions from a different perspective. Many of their answers would be of interest to anyone currently considering investing the time and energy required to learn agent-based modeling. But given the space available here, I will briefly comment on just three of the most common and/or most interesting responses. Each anonymized and lightly edited student response is followed by my thoughts on the topic. Don't Take My Word For It: Students' Thoughts On Agent-Based Modeling The SAA Archaeo.

Don't Take My Word For It: Students' Thoughts On Agent-Based Modeling

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