Schedule
10:00-10:15 - Opening
Jason Yoder
10:15-10:35 - Lightning talks
James Stovold, Martha Emerson, Matthew A. Moreno, Emily Dolson, Imy Khan
10:35-11:05 - Artifact Exchange
11:05-11:10 - Break
11:10-11:55 - Panel Discussion: Learning from a Century of ALife Education
Charles Ofria, Susan Stepney, Steen Rasmussen, Hiroki Sayama
11:55-12:00 - Wrap Up
Call for lightning talks
Do you have a course, tool, assignment, or approach you'd like to share with the ALife education community? We invite short lightning talks from workshop attendees.
Topics welcome
Anything relevant to teaching ALife or using ALife methods in the classroom — a course you've developed, a simulation tool, a creative assignment, an outreach activity, or lessons learned from integrating ALife into your curriculum.
Submit your proposal
Fill out the short application form to express your interest. Space is limited, so apply early. We welcome participants at all career stages and from all ALife subfields.
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.