Royal Institution Masterclasses in Computer Science: Year 10, 2021

Week 5, 3 July: Cellular Automata

Advance Preparation on Turtle

In the Week 5 session, we’ll be programming Cellular Automata – computer models that are simple but powerful, and can help us to understand many diverse phenomena from disease epidemics (such as Covid), to crystal growth, to social segregation. You will get much more out of this session if you have already familiarised yourself with The Turtle System, in which we’ll be working using the language Pascal. There are two versions of the system – the version for Windows is more powerful, but the online version supports the same programs.

Windows Version of Turtle

You can download version 14 of the Turtle software for Windows from https://www.turtle.ox.ac.uk/ . Click on the blue download button labelled “The Turtle System” and follow the instructions in the paragraph just under that button.

Online Version of Turtle

If you are not using a Windows machine, or you don't want to install the Windows Turtle System, you can access the Online Turtle System at https://www.turtle.ox.ac.uk/run

There's a PDF guide to the online system for you here.

Masterclass Worksheet for Practice in Advance

To familiarise yourself with the system, try working through the Year 9 Masterclass worksheet, “Spirals and Shapes with Turtle Pascal”, available here. If you encounter difficulties, note these down and we’ll talk through them in the Week 5 session. But try to get through as much of the worksheet as you can. If you would like more exercises to improve your skills, try out the “Turtle Pascal Self-Teach Exercises” available at https://www.turtle.ox.ac.uk/documentation/exercises

Masterclass Worksheet for the Session

We’ll begin by working through a handout on “Getting Started with Cellular Automata”, which you can get from here. Then we’ll be discussing some of the examples and ideas in a much longer document designed for you to work through in your own time, “Cellular Automata: Modelling Disease, ‘Life’, and Shell Patterns”, available here.

Who will I meet during today's sessions?

The academic sessions will be led by Professor Peter Millican. Working across the two student cohots, from the Computer Science staff side we have Suzanna Marsh and Rohan Chakraborty. We also have two student ambassadors: Luca and Emily. We've put together a page where you can find out more about some of the people you will meet regularly during the RIMC programme.

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