NiCE Teacher Workshop: Engaging K-12 Teachers in the Development of Curricular Materials That Utilize Complex Networks Concepts

TL;DR

This paper describes a workshop that trained K-12 teachers in network science concepts, enabling them to create educational resources and integrate complex networks into their teaching.

Contribution

It introduces a workshop model that effectively equips teachers with network science tools and produces publicly available lesson plans for classroom use.

Findings

Teachers developed new curriculum resources incorporating network science.

The workshop increased teachers' understanding of complex networks.

Publicly available lesson plans support broader educational adoption.

Abstract

Our educational systems must prepare students for an increasingly interconnected future, and teachers require equipping with modern tools, such as network science, to achieve this. We held a Networks in Classroom Education (NiCE) workshop for a group of 21 K-12 teachers with various disciplinary backgrounds. The explicit aim of this was to introduce them to concepts in network science, show them how these concepts can be utilized in the classroom, and empower them to develop resources, in the form of lesson plans, for themselves and the wider community. Here we detail the nature of the workshop and present its outcomes - including an innovative set of publicly available lesson plans. We discuss the future for successful integration of network science in K-12 education, and the importance of inspiring and enabling our teachers.