What is StarLogo Nova?
StarLogo Nova is a free, web-based modeling and simulation environment created by MIT's Scheller Teacher Education Program. It lets you build, run, and explore agent-based simulations right in your browser. No downloads, no installs.
Bring complex systems to life in your classroom
StarLogo Nova gives you a visual, block-based programming language that makes it easy to introduce students to computational thinking without getting bogged down in syntax. Students snap together blocks to define how individual agents behave, then run the simulation to see what emerges when thousands of agents interact.
You can create simulations that illustrate concepts across disciplines: biology, physics, ecology, social science, and more. Model how a disease spreads through a population, how predator-prey dynamics reach equilibrium, or how traffic jams form without any single cause.
StarLogo Nova also includes classroom tools: organize students into classes, distribute starter projects, and review their work. No prior programming experience is required from you or your students. The platform is developed and supported by researchers at MIT's Scheller Teacher Education Program.
Explore how simple rules create complex behavior
With StarLogo Nova, you program individual agents (like ants, molecules, or people) and watch what happens when thousands of them interact at once. You don't write traditional code. Instead, you drag and drop blocks that define behaviors: move forward, turn, follow a scent, reproduce, or die.
Your simulation runs in real time in a built-in 3D world. You can change variables on the fly, make agents faster, add more of them, tweak the rules, and immediately see how the system responds. It's a way of testing hypotheses by building them and watching what happens.
When you're done, you can keep your project private or share it publicly for others to explore and remix. Everything runs in the browser, so there's nothing to download or install.
A tool for thinking about systems
Curious about how flocking, epidemics, or traffic jams emerge from simple rules? StarLogo Nova is for anyone who wants to understand emergent behavior, whether you're a researcher, a hobbyist, or just curious about how the world works.
Agent-based modeling is a way of studying complex systems by simulating the individual parts. Instead of writing equations that describe the whole system, you define simple rules for each agent and let the complexity emerge. StarLogo Nova makes this kind of thinking accessible without requiring a programming background.
You can browse and remix projects shared by the community, or start from scratch and build your own. It's free and open to use - just create an account and start building.