'Boids' of a feather flock together...or do they?

July 20, 2016 - Have you ever seen a school of hundreds of tiny fish, swimming together in a tight formation, suddenly make an abrupt turn when startled by something outside the group? 

How do they manage to do that without crashing into each other?

Who’s following who, and how do they get into formation when there doesn’t seem to be one single fish leading the rest? 

And have you wondered if there was a way you yourself could change the way they move?

These are the sorts of questions Pratim Sengupta is asking.  And he’s taking these questions to the public.

The assistant professor and research chair of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) education in the Werklund School of Education, has developed a hands-on, open-source and public project to help people understand how complex systems operate.

It’s called DigiPlay @ WSE Public, and Sengupta explains that the idea behind the project is to create a public participatory space where anyone can play, modify and create complex simulations and visualizations.

“While science and art museums do indeed offer ‘play’ spaces to the public, our space provides the public access to the same simulations and underlying computational code that professional scientists, engineers and digital artists use,” he explains.

The exhibit, currently installed in the main floor breezeway between the Education Tower and the Education Classroom Block, consists of three massive touch-screen monitors, which visitors can use to interact with simulations of complex systems in which larger scale patterns, such as “flocks” of birds, or 'boids', as they are referred to in computer science, emerge as each virtual boid performs simple interactions with neighboring boids.    

But Sengupta has taken this a step farther.  While visitors can directly interact with these flocks by manipulating the patterns, they can also make deeper changes to the underlying, open-source code.  

And he encourages people to do this on a regular basis.

“It has only been a few weeks since we opened the display,” he explains, “and within that time, we have already seen that visitors’ changes to the code have resulted in completely new patterns of behavior that were novel behaviors even for seasoned scientists who build these simulations for their research.” 

Programming for young and….not so young

In May, Sengupta was able to share his project with hundreds of attendees at Congress 2016.  He says a wide spectrum of academics interacted with the installation – ranging from deans in different faculties for various universities to first-year graduate students.  “As in any public exhibit, he says, “there was a range of interactions – from the very brief to the very long, and from cursory to a deep engagement.”

“The most interesting interaction I noticed,” he continues, “was that some of the visitors would come back to the installation several times in order to make deeper changes to the simulation, and would also sometimes bring their friends with them.”

“This is the kind of learning that is only possible at spaces like this--learning with friends, and learning about the unknown, unscripted--through deliberations, collaboration and eventually, inventions.”

In a few weeks, Sengupta is hoping to bring some of the campus’ youngest community members to the video wall.  He’s been in touch with the Campus Daycare Centre to invite the children to come and experiment with the simulations.

“Visitors in this space, as in any public space, vary in ages. My research also shows that even young children can meaningfully understand and discover these complex mathematical patterns using such forms of computing, as it is deeply connected to their embodied forms of sense making.”

Research highlights how teaching and learning has evolved

Sengupta’s main interest lies in inventing new programming languages and computing platforms to make STEM education accessible to everyone.  He says that, as a designer and an inventor, a project such as this opens up a range of possibilities for creating new computing machines and software for the public; in fact, his next project, in collaboration with 2016 PURE award winner and Werklund undergrad student Weston Sandberg, will involve new interactive exhibits that will enable visitors to compute with music and gestures.                 

He adds there are now several graduate programs at Werklund that focus on designing learning environments and technologies, and students in these programs will be able to work with the faculty on further designing this space—a process he welcomes. 

“Learning for everyone, can be very rich and complex, not unlike the experience of scientists, artists and engineers,” he says.  “Invention and discovery are much more powerful mechanisms for learning, and as a leading school of education, it is important we create and share these examples of open computing in ways that could not have been thought of a few years back.”