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This is a short report of teaching students how to write programs in NetLogo. As the student loved to spend gratification time in this computer room with a simple graphics adventure game, I Think it would be a nice idea to offer them a dedicated graphically oriented programming course so they would learn to understand better the insides of software creation. In addition, the class should foster analytical and logical thought. This is why I recommend to present the programming course usingNetLogo. I think a good programming language for student is NetLogo. I recognized the immediacy of graphical feedback and the ease with which turtles were created and programmed, and the flexibility and versatility of the cycle-based simultaneous evaluation scheme of the patch actions. So NetLogo appeared to be for me ideally suited for aprogramming course for students: it was highly scalable and "instant" in that commands could be tried out and evaluated at will. My first task was to come to terms with the idea that some students had in mind and aquainted the students to the notion of a programmable turtle. At the beginning of the course, I became the turtle and let myself be directed by the one student's commands. I translated their "turtle" commands and wrote thedefinition on the blackboard. They instantly grasped the notion of commands being qualified by parameters as in "forward 10". So firmly in fact that seconds after I had explained how to create turtles, how to set their size and color and have them set their pen down, the screens were overcrowded by turtles, as some children had created not one (as suggested), but 500 turtles at once. And when they had that large numbers of turtles move simultaneously, really strange and beautiful patterns emerged. Some magnified the turtles to size 1000 and higher. Even though I had designed the turtles myself to resemble "real" turtles more closely than the default abstract arrow shape, I had difficulty to recognize them again at such large magnification. But they still looked funny...Some students had big problems switching between the "T>" and "O>" mode for commands. As I didn't want them to have to write "ask turtle 0 [bla bla]" each time, I asked them to switch to turtle "T>" mode, but when they tried to "create-turtles" or "clear-all", they had to switch back again to the observer, which wasn't very logical to some of them. In fact, if the user is in observer mode "O>", it is difficult to reason why NetLogo, as an intelligent system, should not recognize that neither the observer nor the patches are able to move "forward 10" and that the command was really directed at the turtle(s) on the screen.
Approximate Word count = 1623
Approximate Pages = 6.5
(250 words per page double spaced)
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