A butterfly flaps its wings; elsewhere, a hurricane brews. Financial markets suffer from flash crashes and recover as quickly, for reasons no one can agree. It’s simple to grasp how a disease spreads from one person to the next, but the spread through cities and countries is much less predictable. We know the weather is influenced by temperature, humidity, wind speed and direction, but we still get caught out by rain that’s not in the forecast.

Despite growing complexity in the world around us, learning in school still often follows linear paths, where students learn answers to known problems and cause and effect follow the same sequence. Professor Uri Wilensky, Lorraine H. Morton Professor of Learning Sciences, Computer Science and Complex Systems at Northwestern University, has challenged such traditional approaches to learning. Through equipping students with the cognitive tools to understand and engage with nonlinear, complex systems and phenomena, he helps them build the agency and confidence to navigate today’s complex and interconnected world.

His approach is as simple as it is powerful: In his NetLogo software environment, students and researchers can set instructions and rules governing the behaviors of individual components of a system and observe how their interactions can lead to change and evolution throughout the system. Tweaking the instructions and running the models repeatedly will result in a wide range of outcomes. Uri, an architect of computational thinking, examines how new representations shift our ability to think and learn, and how computational representations can recast knowledge across different scientific and social domains. He describes agent-based modelling to study complexity as akin to switching from Roman to Hindu-Arabic numerals in arithmetic. Without this switch to a new ‘language’, we couldn’t have developed advanced mathematics like algebra or calculus. And so the new language of agent-based modeling can reveal new ways to understand the challenges of today’s AI-enabled, increasingly complex world.

NetLogo is powerful enough for advanced scientific research in natural and social sciences, and intuitive enough for young children to use. Through this tool, he has created a universal language for understanding complex phenomena, bridging domains and subjects and fostering a new generation of interdisciplinary thinkers.

Out of a deep commitment to creating a better world through education, Uri has made NetLogo free and open source for the whole global community. The desktop version has been downloaded over 2.5 million times since 2010, and its web-based version is accessed tens of thousands of times each month. Going the extra mile, he and his team created a block-based version which lowers the barriers for non-coders to experiment with computational modeling. He has also contributed to numerous curriculum development efforts globally, integrating agent-based modeling tools and computational modeling across various subjects.