Network Science in Your Pocket

Abstract

To prepare even a single lecture on network science, instructors have to deal with a large amount of different kinds of materials, such as images, charts, and documents. If the lecture contains hands-on activities, various programming environments for C, C++, Java, Python, etc., also have to be provided. Connection to the Internet is also preferable, since students may look up various technical terms online during the class and the instructor may also use online contents during a lecture. These issues become particularly challenging in educational outreach settings, where the instructor needs to give a lecture at elementary or secondary schools outside her home campus. Under such circumstances, all the materials for the lecture have to be made portable, together with the programming environments and Internet connections. Here we report our initiative, named “Network Science in Your Pocket,” to construct completely portable hardware/software environments for off-campus educational outreach of network science, which was made possible by recent advancements of tiny single-board computer technology. In this chapter, we describe a sample project for building such environments and lecture materials. A case study in an open-house outreach course given at a technical college in Japan is also presented.