ICLC 2025 Catalogue

Making living patterns with Cellpond

Lu Wilson

Explore living patterns with Cellpond! Cellpond is a tool that lets you make visual patterns by building rules that change the grid-based world over time. We’ll learn how to live code it — by dragging and dropping the different shapes on the screen. We’ll start simple, building our own custom colours and brushes for drawing pictures. Then we’ll build up to more advanced creations, like particles and fractals. And we’ll end up with a pattern that’s also an ecosystem — a pattern that’s “live” in the sense that it’s a living system. In other words, we’ll make a pattern that’s alive.