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Since July 2013, students in Manhattan’s Chelsea CTE High School Cisco Networking Academy have been learning about Network Science and applying their knowledge to conduct original research. With additional funding from the National Science Foundation, the four students – Anthony Andiappen, Yessica Balderas, Khalid Iyaub, and Markia Theus – have spent the year working closely with grad students from Stevens Institute of Technology and their Cisco Networking Academy teacher John Tebbett to develop and implement a Network Science research project. Project partners include the New York Hall of Science, USMA West Point, SUNY Binghamton and Boston University.
The year began in July with a two-week intensive workshop at Boston University, during which the students were introduced to the growing field of Network Science through tutorials, presentations by guest lecturers, and hands-on sessions in the computer lab. They became familiar with using data analysis software such as Python, Gephi, Ora and NetLogo. They also had to collaboratively work on and present a project, complete with data visualization – good preparation for the year to come.
During the school year, the students met weekly with the Stevens grad students from Dr. Yasu Sakamoto’s research lab, which has a focus on the thinking of individuals and crowds through behavioral experiments and computer simulations. The team chose to focus its research on Twitter posts using Social Network Analysis, specifically on Tweets corresponding to the Super Bowl and whether users’ locations correlated to frequency of retweeting. (See the team poster for more details.) In January the team’s efforts were highlighted during a presentation to the NYC Department of Education Technical Advisory Board at the Cisco NYC headquarters.
At the suggestion of the team’s teacher, Cisco Networking Academy’s John Tebbett, Chelsea High School also participated in a ground-breaking effort to introduce the entire Chelsea Ninth Grade faculty to Network Science concepts during a one-day Professional Development workshop at the New York Hall of Science. The faculty then spent the spring semester developing lesson plans connecting to the Network Science concepts they had learned. For more details, visit: https://sites.google.com/a/nyscience.org/netscihigh/2013-14/chelsea-teacher-pd
In May, the Chelsea team met with the other NetSciHigh teams at USMA West Point for Cadet Project day.
In June the team’s poster was presented at the International Network Science Conference in Berkeley, California. And as a final wrap-up for the year, the students will return to Boston University in July to present their poster at a day-long conference with researchers and incoming NetSciHigh students.
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