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

“Mitchel Resnick’s book is one of the very few in the field of computing with an interdisciplinary discourse that can reach beyond the technical community to philosophers, psychologists, and historians and sociologists of science.” — Sherry Turkle, Professor, Program in Science, Technology, and Society, Massachusetts Institute of Technology “Resnick’s work provides a rare glimpse of what I am sure will become a new paradigm for research in education.”

How does a bird flock keep its movements so graceful and synchronized? Most people assume that the bird in front leads and the others follow. In fact, bird flocks don’t have leaders: they are organized without an organizer, coordinated without a coordinator. And a surprising number of other systems, from termite colonies to traffic jams to economic systems, work the same decentralized way. Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams describes innovative new computational tools that can help people (even young children) explore the workings of such systems—and help them move beyond the centralized mindset.