As you may know I am a biology teacher. Next term I will teach Ecology. One part of that is the relationship between predators and prey (wolves and rabbits, for example). There are quite some mathematical model for these relationships, in school we mostly teach a simplified version of the Lotka-Volterra system.

This kind of stuff really needs a simple application to test the influence of certain factors. For example,

• what happens if after two years we kill all but 5 predators?


• what happens if after two years we kill all but 5 prey?


• what happens if after 1 year, for whatever reasons, the rabbits become more fertile?

There are tools schools can buy, but a) they suck and b) they are very expensive.

Introducing: "Predator and Prey" by Carsten Niehaus (tm)





As you can see the basic stuff all works. When happens when I start with just on predator but 20 prey but let the predators be more efficient hunters? Look here:






The application is written in PyQt4 using matplotlib. I would really like to express one thing: Python + Qt4 rocks. Seriously, the whole application has only 306 lines including comments!

Are you interested in the code or even in helping me writing a cool PP-Simulation? Do you think this should go into KDE EDU? I am hosting everything in GitHub: PP in GitHub.

From today on 32 laptops in my school have Marble 0.6.1 on Windows XP installed. Runs nicely. Lets see how our geography teachers like it!

Next week I will install it on another 16 machines.