Students’ collaborative reasoning about natural selection as a complex system through the use of netLogo as a digital representation

This paper investigates the potential use of NetLogo to help students develop a comprehensive understanding of the concept of natural selection. NetLogo is an agent based software environment that provides facilities allowing students to reason about natural selection as a complex system. Year 10 students from a number of Australian secondary schools participated in programs focused on evolution run at a science education centre in Melbourne, Australia. The programs were designed to enable students to investigate natural selection by considering Darwin’s finches and the relationship between malaria and the HBB gene. Much of this exploration was carried out through the use of NetLogo, which enabled students to simulate natural selection in action. This paper discusses some preliminary findings, which the authors plan to further explore and elaborate in future papers, based on video data, student artifacts and classroom observations. It is suggested that by using NetLogo to explore natural selection, students can use the software as a digital representation thereby coconstructing various representations and comprehensive understandings of natural selection as a complex system.