An agent based modelling tool to simulate a classroom environment and study peer learning in a classroom. This project is developed as a part of my ABMS course

The goal of this project is to build a tool based on netlogo to study peer learning in a classroom setting. The goal is to enable researchers on the topic to use this tool and understand how students learn from their peers in a classroom. This will help teachers to build better strategies to teaching, test it one simulation, beta test it using a few students as participate, analyse, refine before rolling out.

Significance of the project: Education is a very sensitive science. The tech world typical attitude of 'move fast and break things' will not work here. Any policy, strategy designed has to be analysed, tested rigorously before we let actual students follow that. This robust process, which ensures that policy changes are correct, also slows down development and progress in building new products, testing new strategies. This tool will help speed up this process while ensuring that proper testing and analysis is done. I got the idea of this project while taking on the agent based modelling course in college and also working on a heutagogy LMS.

The project has three types of actors (agents). Students, Teachers, learning material. Each actor will have a set of characters, parameters and traits. These data will be collected from research and data collection in a classroom or an online LMS system. Apart from these entities, there will be various procedures (functions) that will be triggered at intended time. There will be a set of metrics in every students that would be monitored. At last there will be a method (A teaching strategy) that needs to tested. Depending on this teaching strategy and various characteristics of the learning material, several metrics from the student will be measured to see that the strategy being tested is effective. After this first preliminary test, A seperate Netlogo's hubnet based code will be used to involve students (in the place of student agents in the code) and teachers (in the place of teacher agents in the code) in the loop for a 'beta test' on the effectiveness of the strategy at place.