How Do Ants Know What to Do?

• In Event: Modeling in Multiple Forms

Abstract

The world is full of self-organized, complex systems. Teaching about these systems holds the key to understanding many important phenomena. However, there are two main challenges in teaching the subject: level slippage where participants misattribute activity in a system, and not accounting for the individual parts of a system. This paper presents analysis of participants learning about ant colonies that demonstrates ways past these difficulties. The paper demonstrates how constructivist dialogue mapping can be used to track how science learners come to understand the simple agents that account for the complex interactions common in natural self-organized systems.

Authors

• Kit Martin, Northwestern University

• Uri J. Wilensky, Northwestern University