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Agent-based modelling (ABM) is a powerful approach for simulating complexity and for understanding the emergent phenomena core to multiple disciplines across the physical and social sciences (Wilensky, 2001). ABM is thus often understood as an innovation in STEM education, providing a representational infrastructure for understanding complexity by “growing it” (Epstein & Axtell, 1996; Wilensky & Papert, 2010). While this is certainly true, we argue that expressive and artistic uses of “swarms” of computational agents can also provide accessible entry points for learners and can support them in developing a range of intuitions about the kinds of phenomena that they might simulated with ABM. This offers a “STEAM” oriented introduction to modelling, connecting artistic perspectives with scientific perspectives in fundamental ways. In this paper we describe the iterative design and implementation of activities that highlight the expressive potential and social syntonicity (Brady et al, 2016) of one of the fundamental types of agent in the ABM toolkit (the “patches”). We describe a setting in which we have done design-based research over two years, in summer camps (entitled “Code Your Art”) and school-year activities involving rising fifth through eighth grade students (participants aged from 10-15) attending school in a mid-sized urban district in the southeastern USA with a high proportion of traditionally underserved and minoritized youth.