[starlogo-users] Epidemic tutorial and other comments...

[josh]

Hi,

First of all, I can't tell you enough how great I think StarlogoTNG is.
I'm a teacher and this software is very motivating for my kids and I
think it's great, so don't get me wrong on my criticism below! :-)

I pointed my kids to the online tutorials and gave them a similar
assignment. I noticed my kids all had some very poor implementations of
variables, and they pointed out that that was exactly how it was done in
the Epidemic tutorial. I checked as was surprised to notice that the
tutorial isn't really in very good programming style.

In the example collision block the test for whether an agent is sick
shouldn't be by checking his color, it should be by checking a boolean
agent variable called "is sick". Similarly using a number agent variable
for Immune and then checking whether it's equal to 0 is a poor man's
hack for a boolean "is immune". The continues with the monitor, which
then shouldn't count everybody with "color = red" but with "is sick".

I've created a very clean (I think) implementation of the Epidemic
simulation and would be happy to contribute it if you are interested.

I've also made a clean implementation of the paintball game (which I
would also be happy to contribute) in which the agents fire back at
mario with variable firing rate, and the paintballs have limited
adjustable range. However, there seems to be a bug in the collision
logic in StarLogoTNG, as many paintballs fly right through Mario without
triggering the collision block, especially when the paintballs are
smaller. Do you have bugzilla or some other bug database where users can
submit bugs?

cheers again and onward to Release 4/Beta 1!!!

-j