Introduction

Ant Colony is a menu‑driven simulation on a 2D grid.

Students explore how nests, worker ants, pheromones and food interact over discrete stages.

Each stage ants may move, pick up/drop food and lay pheromone that decays over time. Nests consume food and may spawn or cull ants based on stored food.

This resource helps students prepare for A Level Paper 1 (Summer 2026) using the public AQA skeleton.

It consists of the following sections:

Code breakdown: detailed technical overview of the skeleton program, describing the role of each class and method (purpose/function, parameters and return values) plus key interactions.
UML class diagram activity: study the program and fill in the gaps with the missing class/method names, data types, associations and access levels.

Code breakdown: a detailed technical overview of the skeleton program, describing in detail each class and method in turn – including their purpose/function, parameters and return values. Note that this is intended as a helpful reference document only, and not as a substitute for exploring the code in a practical manner.

UML class diagram : requires you to study the program.