"The World of Langton's Ant" was conceived with several different objectives in mind. At the most basic level, it was intended to provide a model of science education following the goals defined in "Revisiting Science in Culture: Science as Story Telling and Story Revising" (see Further Considerations: Education).
At a slightly more ambitious level, the aim was to provide a useful introduction to core ideas in the developing interdisciplinary field of "emergence" or "complex systems". (see to left)
Most ambitiously, the intent was test an intuition about the complementarity of teaching and research: the idea that carefully working through an elementary phenomenon in the way needed for effective teaching would also help to generate ideas and frameworks that could advance professional understanding in particular fields of inquiry. (see to left below) |