Description
Some of your students may spend hours tinkering with this macro-assisted, life-simulating Excel spreadsheet to study and appreciate ecology, and to see how the spreadsheet program achieves complex purposes. The product is best used as an exploration opportunity for single students or pairs of students.
Mathematician John Conway’s simple rules for simulating a life form (1970) are the starting point for the spreadsheet. Multiple enhancements let the student create, compare, and contrast up to five “species” that can behave simultaneously on an edgeless 25x25 grid.
The Conway rules specify when an “organism” dies from overcrowding, continues living, dies from lack of conspecific neighbors, and reproduces into an empty spreadsheet cell. Your students can modify all of these, independently for each active species.
Parameters original with this product are the species life span, the likelihood of spontaneous death, the likelihood of spontaneous reproduction into vacant cells anywhere, and the amount of time that a dead organism blocks new growth. Students may think of the spontaneous deaths as due to disease, predation, or human intervention like weeding. The spontaneous births may represent distribution of seeds by wind or by herbivores, or adventurous colonization by animal species. Again, each parameter is settable independently for each species.
Multiple panels let the spreadsheet user look ahead and back, to see specific changes up close. Three customizable panels can serve as staging areas for organism patterns that the user may want to seed the active “environment” with, in order to test modifications to the species parameters. Randomized seeding is also an option, with settable shares for each of the active species.
Highlights
Description
Some of your students may spend hours tinkering with this macro-assisted, life-simulating Excel spreadsheet to study and appreciate ecology, and to see how the spreadsheet program achieves complex purposes. The product is best used as an exploration opportunity for single students or pairs of students.
Mathematician John Conway’s simple rules for simulating a life form (1970) are the starting point for the spreadsheet. Multiple enhancements let the student create, compare, and contrast up to five “species” that can behave simultaneously on an edgeless 25x25 grid.
The Conway rules specify when an “organism” dies from overcrowding, continues living, dies from lack of conspecific neighbors, and reproduces into an empty spreadsheet cell. Your students can modify all of these, independently for each active species.
Parameters original with this product are the species life span, the likelihood of spontaneous death, the likelihood of spontaneous reproduction into vacant cells anywhere, and the amount of time that a dead organism blocks new growth. Students may think of the spontaneous deaths as due to disease, predation, or human intervention like weeding. The spontaneous births may represent distribution of seeds by wind or by herbivores, or adventurous colonization by animal species. Again, each parameter is settable independently for each species.
Multiple panels let the spreadsheet user look ahead and back, to see specific changes up close. Three customizable panels can serve as staging areas for organism patterns that the user may want to seed the active “environment” with, in order to test modifications to the species parameters. Randomized seeding is also an option, with settable shares for each of the active species.
