Peter Worsley Undergraduate Dissertation 2016/17

Development of a Cellular Automata-based teaching tool in Python

Supervised by D.Walker

Abstract

Cellular automata are introduced to second year computer science students in the 'Bio-inspired computing and robotics' module at the University of Sheffield. To compliment the teaching, a Java-based tool was employed to save users from creating their own cellular automata framework, and instead modify the existing project. This Java software lacks in features and usability, and this project aimed to rectify these issues by creating a new Python-based tool to assist with the teaching.

Through surveying users, prototyping, careful design and testing, the Python tool was created and applied in the 2017 teaching of the module, where it was received positively by the students. The Python replacement houses a plethora of features not available in the Java software, for example, the addition of a graphical user interface to control an automaton's execution, as well as significantly improving on the performance of the previous software.