Inside a classroom there are many individual as well as social processes, which are integrated into a bigger one: education. When one analyzes a classroom and the dynamics that exists inside it, there is no doubt that one is in presence of a system, which is composed of individuals who influence each other, and from that interactions it emerges dynamics that cannot be explained only in terms of the isolated behaviour of each individual. Hence, when speaking of human behaviour systems, as it happens in a classroom, it naturally emerges a link to complex systems, i.e. those systems which are composed of interacting and excitable parts. This interaction creates non-linear behaviour, which is not exactly predictable. This new understanding of natural phenomena has merged many different disciplines into a coherent frame, which has helped to find important common ground among them. The present paper aims at providing the elements which allow us to understand the educational phenomena in the classroom as characteristic behaviour of complex systems. At the same time, the paper introduces a tool which makes possible to model the behaviour inside a classroom, including its inherent complexity.
Education; classroom; complex systems; non-linear; agent-based modelling