Everything you need to know before submitting your entry.
The NetSciEd Challenge is open to students worldwide. Individual and team submissions are welcome. All participants must provide a school affiliation and school website URL.
You will need to provide your name, email address, school name, school website URL, and grade level. Your name and email are never displayed publicly. Entries are identified on the graph and map by submission title, school, and grade only.
Give your entry a title. This is how it will appear on the public graph. Make it descriptive and memorable — for example, "The Hidden Web of My School Cafeteria" or "How Coral Reefs Connect."
In no more than 250 words, describe the network you have chosen. It can be any network — social, biological, technological, ecological, transportation, information, economic, or something entirely different.
Upload a visualization of your network. This must be created by you — a photograph, drawing, illustration, diagram, or video still are all acceptable. The following are not permitted: images found online, AI-generated images, or screenshots from software.
Accepted formats: JPG, PNG. Maximum file size: 10MB.
Explain what the nodes of your network are. What are the individual entities, elements, or things that make up the network?
Explain what the edges of your network are. What are the connections, relationships, or links between the nodes?
What was surprising to you when you viewed your topic as a network? What patterns emerged? What did you see differently?
Use any AI tool (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Midjourney, or any other) to create something new inspired by your network and your answers to Questions 1–5. Describe what you created, which AI tool you used, and provide a link to your creation.
Your AI creation can be anything: a visualization, an interactive app, a poem, a song, a simulation, a chatbot, a video, an animation — there are no limits on format.
Note: Your AI creation will be reviewed by a human before it appears on the public graph. Questions 1–5 go live immediately.
Every valid submission is automatically added to the live graph database. There is no human gatekeeper for Questions 1–5. The system works like this:
1. You submit the form on the Submit Entry page.
2. The Claude API analyzes your five text answers to extract your network type, domain category, node types, edge types, and which Network Literacy concepts you demonstrated.
3. Your school is geocoded (placed on the map) from its website URL.
4. All of this data is written to Neo4j AuraDB as nodes and relationships.
5. Your entry appears on the Live Graph and Live Map within moments.
6. Your Q6 AI creation is held for human review, then published once approved.
Your name and email address are collected for administration purposes only and are never displayed on the public graph, map, or anywhere on this site. Entries are publicly identified by their submission title, school name, and grade level.
You retain ownership of your submission. By entering, you grant Network Literacy permission to display your answers and visualization on this site as part of the public graph. All entries are displayed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, consistent with the Network Literacy framework itself.
Contact naevideo at networkliteracy.org with any questions about the competition.
