lambdaCA: a Peer Learning Cellular Automaton

Description

This paper proposes to model a world populated by learners where each one has his own behaviour which is expressed by his way to follow a school curricula. The paper deals with peer learning and, especially, with the school exclusion phenomena. The aim is to answer the question: even if we make the assumption that all the learners are equivalent, can exclusion be avoided? The reason to model such a process is not to show that exclusion would be a fate but rather to distinguish what in the learning process is due to endogenous causes from what is due to exogenous causes. To address this topic we propose the λCA model which is a one-dimensional, probabilistic, totalistic cellular automata with a finite ordered set of states where the transition function take into account the order. The issue of finding peer learning strategies to minimize exclusion can be restated in such a context as a kind of synchronization problem.

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