Northwestern University researchers created a programming platform called Netlogo some years ago, and it's likely a million students, graduate students and even professors have used this to learn how to program, run its hundreds of prewritten simulations in just about every STEM field for assignments, or used it for actual, high-level research that is agent-based.
By agents, we mean individual objects or even organisms. Netlogo is designed to, as easily as can be done, develop programs and simulations where individual entities interact with each other by some set of rules or mathematical law. You can do orbits, for example, since this is just individual objects interacting through Newton's law of gravity. You can do growth of bacteria, since those are individual organisms that follow some statistical rule for reproduction. You can simulate forest fires since each tree is an individual organism (an agent), and the spread of fire follows a relatively simple rule (if a neighboring tree catches fire, those trees next to it will catch on fire).
It is worthwhile to check this out. You can download it, or run it on the Web, so even ChromeBooks can use Netlogo. There is a library with hundreds of examples, and you are free to modify the code for any of them to learn the language and create your own versions of the original simulation!
