SIMULATION OF SWARM BEHAVIOUR AS A METHOD OF EXAMINING STUDENTS’ CAPABILITY TO CONDUCT EXPERIMENTS – A CASE STUDY

The use of technologies for conducting virtual simulations is becoming ever more common, not only in the area of business (training for experts), but also in the field of education, providing an additional source of knowledge acquisition and stimulating the interest and involvement of the audience. Thanks to the use of methods of visualisation and simulation in virtual space it is possible to become independent from the time and place of experimentation and reduces its costs. In addition, it eliminates the possibility of incidents caused by technical problems associated with long-term or improper operation of research equipment. Moreover, digital simulations can be repeated any number of times in a relatively short period, regardless of the results of the previous iterations.

The paper presents task scenarios for students to carry out experiments in the Unity 3d graphic environment, including the issue of behavioural simulation of a set of moving objects acting like a swarm of virtual robots. The content of the scenarios varies in terms of the conditions prevailing in virtual space (the coordinates of the starting point and destination, the size and location of obstacles), the initial values of the variables of each of the robots (the forces affecting each other: separation, alignment, consistency, avoidance) and the characteristics of the entire collection of robots (e.g. their number). The realisation of the scenario consisted of manipulating the range of the possible values of the available variables, observation of the simulation containing the modifications, and the search for relationships and dependences between features and ranges of values entered. This teaching method has the nature of a pilot test.

The article describes a method of verifying the correctness of the simulation tasks executions and the level of matching the task’s content to the level of skills and knowledge of students of different disciplines. Furthermore, the study presents examples of prepared experiment scenarios and selected excerpts of the documentation of the students’ work and the results they achieved.