About the workshop
How should we teach artificial life? This workshop brings together ALife researchers and educators to tackle that question.
Why this matters
A field too broad to teach in isolation
Education shapes who enters the field and how they think, ultimately determining its future coherence. ALife has been highly interdisciplinary from the outset, providing innovative opportunities but making it challenging to teach while conveying its breadth. Meanwhile, work utilizing ALife methodology continues to enrich and diversify across computational, biological, and robotic subfields; researchers from different traditions increasingly struggle to communicate or build on each other's work.
Building shared foundations
Shared educational foundations can close that gap — but only if the community deliberately builds them. Each ALife educator brings a unique perspective and approach; this workshop embraces that diversity while identifying common ground and leveraging it as a strength.
What we'll do
We will work toward actionable guiding principles — from teaching ALife as a standalone course or embedding it in existing curricula, to pitching ALife to stakeholders such as students and administrators, to integrating research and education across science, engineering, the humanities, and social sciences.
This workshop builds upon virtual ALife education mini-workshops taking place in May 2026, expanding into an in-person format that draws on the broader community gathered at the annual conference.
It will combine presentations with interactive sessions, featuring working examples from active ALife educators, collaborative construction of shared materials, and structured discussion on what distinguishes ALife pedagogy.
What you'll take away
Pedagogical principles
Actionable approaches you can adopt in your own courses, whether teaching ALife as a standalone subject or embedding it in existing curricula.
Educator connections
Connections to a cross-subfield educator network spanning computational, biological, and robotic traditions within ALife.
Draft recommendations
Draft recommendations that could inform ISAL's education initiatives and help shape the future of ALife pedagogy.