Center for Connected Learning

The Center for Connected Learning and Computer-Based Modeling (CCL) is a research center at Northwestern University founded by Uri Wilensky in 1995. It is the institutional home of NetLogo, the most widely used platform for agent-based modeling in education and research, and the intellectual successor to the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory's educational computing projects led by Seymour Papert.

CCL's research program occupies the intersection of three domains: the design of computational tools for learning, the study of how learners reason about complex systems, and the development of theoretical frameworks for understanding cognition in computational environments. The center's projects range from elementary school classrooms where children use NetLogo to explore predator-prey dynamics, to research collaborations with epidemiologists modeling disease transmission, to theoretical work on what it means to 'understand' a system you can simulate but cannot solve analytically.

The center's name encodes its theoretical commitments. Connected learning refers to the claim that understanding emerges from the connections between ideas, tools, and social contexts — not from the transmission of isolated facts. Computer-based modeling refers to the further claim that the computer is not merely a delivery mechanism but a medium for thought, a material with which learners construct their understanding. These commitments place CCL squarely in the constructionist tradition, though Wilensky's emphasis on multi-agent systems and collective behavior represents a significant departure from Papert's focus on individual learners and single agents.

CCL has produced a distinctive body of research on connected understanding — the claim that deep knowledge of complex systems requires not merely the ability to predict aggregate behavior but the ability to trace how local interactions produce global patterns. This has informed the design of NetLogo's agent-based paradigm and has produced empirical studies of how learners develop systems thinking through computational modeling.

The center's influence extends beyond education. NetLogo has become a standard tool in computational social science, ecology, and network science, and CCL researchers have contributed to theoretical debates about the relationship between simulation and explanation in the sciences.