To foster understanding of systems, students first work with a familiar example – a cell phone network. Students manually build a schematic of a cell phone network within the class and learn how the complexity of networks makes their analysis very difficult to perform by hand.

Scientists use computer programs to analyze networks because networks are often very complex. Students use the computer program Cytoscape to analyze the cell phone network.

A network is a system of interconnected parts. These parts may be organisms, genes, molecules, etc…Nodes are the parts of a network, and edges are the relationships between those parts of the network

This is our introductory module that we recommend teaching before each of our other modules to give students a background in systems.