Network Literacy: Essential Concepts and Core Ideas is the distillation of thoughts, comments, and writings of over 30 network science researchers, educators, teachers and students.
Network science is a significant pathway into understanding many kinds of Big Data. Since its inceptions during the late 20th century it has been increasing its relevance to people's everyday life. Networks can help us to make sense of this increasingly complex world, making it a useful literacy for people living in the 21st century.
Recent work involving interventions directly with middle and high school students and teachers in developing network science skills in informal and student research settings has demonstrated that network science can be a powerful and motivating approach to understanding and theorizing solutions to complex social, health and environmental problems.
Network science research also provides opportunities to develop many of the skills, habits of mind and core ideas from nascent teaching and learning standards that are not being addressed in extant curricula and teaching practice. There is a need for curricula, resources and professional development about networks, and the network science community needs to take the first steps in making a societal impact by developing accessible educational materials, tools and techniques.
To initiate this process, one key question was posed to the network science community: What should every person living in the 21st century know about networks by the time they finish secondary education? The result presented here — Network Literacy: Essential Concepts and Core Ideas — is truly a group effort, representing the distillation of the thoughts, comments, and writings of over 30 network science researchers, educators, teachers and students.
The NetSciEd Challenge is currently running as a pilot test. The pilot ends on Friday, June 5, 2026 at 5:00 PM (US Eastern).
This pilot is a proof of concept. Its purpose is to test the underlying idea, the website, the operational needs, and the software programming — including the connection to and use of Claude AI for classifying submissions — and to determine the feasibility, costs, and budget for running this as a full global competition. It is also being used to recruit the volunteers who would help run it.
Based on what the pilot shows, the full Challenge may launch sometime in 2026–2027, if it can be funded and staffed so that it can be properly implemented.
If you would like to help bring the Challenge to students worldwide, we would love to hear from you.
Choose a network. Explore it. Visualize it. Then create something new with AI. Every entry becomes part of a living graph database — a network of networks. During the pilot you can try the full submission experience.
The textual content is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International.
Graphic design copyrighted by Eri Yamamoto. All rights reserved. Textual content licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. If you create a derived version, please include a link to the original and let us know.
For more information contact naevideo at networkliteracy.org
