@article {16408, title = {Examining Group Behavior and Collaboration using ABM and Robots}, journal = {Proc. of Agent}, year = {2007}, month = {2007///}, abstract = {Agent-based modeling has been extensively used by scientists to study complex systems.Participatory simulations are similar to agent-based models except that humans play the role of the virtual agents. The Bifocal modeling approach uses sensors to gather data about the real-world phenomena being modeled and uses that information to affect the model. In this work, we are interested in automatically extracting, analyzing and modeling group behaviors in problem solving. Combining these three systems into one unified platform would be useful for those purposes, since it would facilitate a synthesis of their main affordances: understanding the role of locality, mapping human action to emergent behaviors, and controlling embedded physical objects in noisy environments while receiving sensory feedback. We will demonstrate a technological platform based on the NetLogo/HubNet architecture that supports simulated agents, participatory agents and physical agents. We place this platform within a more general framework that we call Human, Embedded and Virtual agents in Mediation (HEV-M). We have run several studies using an instantiation of this platform that consists of a robot-car with four users who navigate a maze. We believe that this tool has potential for three main reasons (1) it facilitates logging of participant{\textquoteright}s actions, so as to identify patterns, (2) it offers researchers in the field of computer-supported collaborative learning an easy-to-use tool to design engaging collaborative learning activities and, (3) it foregrounds the role of individual actions within the accomplishment of a collective goal, highlighting the connections between simple individual actions and the resultant macroscopic behaviors of the system. }, author = {Blikstein,P. and Rand, William and Wilensky,Uri} }