The development of network concepts for students begins with a highly interactive inquiry into cell phone networks. Cell phones serve as a handy knowledge base on which to develop understanding. Each cell phone represents a node, and each phone’s address book represents an edge, or the calling relationships between cell phones.
In this module, students focus on the role of physics and engineering in the increasingly interdisciplinary field of systems biology. Centered on a case study requiring instrumentation for field research, the driving question is “How do scientists measure what they cannot directly observe with their senses?”