2026-09-18T19:18:18Zhttps://dspace.mit.edu/server/oai/requestoai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/1131612026-06-06T00:56:18Zcom_1721.1_7582com_1721.1_7581col_1721.1_131023
Eric Klopfer.
Pan, Jin, M. Eng. Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
2018-01-12T21:00:53Z
2018-01-12T21:00:53Z
2016
2016
http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/113161
1018309466
Thesis: M. Eng., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2016.
This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.
Cataloged from student-submitted PDF version of thesis.
Includes bibliographical references (page 117).
StarLogo Nova is an online blocks-based programming environment designed for pre-college students to explore the collective behavior of decentralized agents. Users can drag and drop blocks to construct graphical scripts that control how individual agents respond to stimuli. These scripts are run by the Execution Engine and rendered in real-time. By investigating hypotheses about how small tweaks to individual behavior impact the entire system, students learn to think beyond the centralized mindset where all actions are dictated by a singular leader. This thesis migrates the Execution Engine from the aging Adobe ActionScript 3 language to TypeScript, a weakly typed language that transpiles to JavaScript. To promote code health, this thesis introduces code formatters, linters, test cases, and a build process. Finally, this thesis optimizes the StarLogo Nova Execution Engine for performance, consistently beating the previous engine and bringing the execution time per cycle for key benchmarks under 10 milliseconds.
by Jin Pan.
M.Eng.
117 pages
eng
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
MIT theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed, downloaded, or printed from this source but further reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission.
http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
Performance engineering of the StarLogo Nova Execution Engine
Thesis
application/pdf
Publication
unknown
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