Worlds of Connections

Worlds of Connections

A white youth with long blonde hair in a ponytail wearing a red shirt sits next to a brown youth with dark locs in a teal shirt at a classroom table. Both youth point in front of their bodies with their right hands while holding cardboard VR headsets to their eyes with their left hands.
Worlds of Connection logo featuring a purple silhouette of someone wearing VR goggles, revealing a colorful pink network

 

Spreading knowledge and excitement about network science among members of underrepresented minority communities to support diversity in bio-behavioral and biomedical careers.

COMING SOON

MuMu: Worlds of Connections

MuMu: Worlds of Connections is the playable VR experience developed by our SEPA team in collaboration with the Johnny Carson Center for Emerging Media Arts. In MuMu: Worlds of Connections, Chapter 1 of the Multispecies Multiplex, discover the interdependence of systems through the eyes of more-than-human intelligences!

A young person wearing a white VR headset, light blue shirt, and white overalls gazes into the headset. The backgrounds shows the sun casting golden light over a prairie. The sunlight causes a lens flare over the person's face.

Free Network Science Activities

We are happy to share our fun, engaging, and hands-on network science activity guides and hope you enjoy them. College students, teachers, middle school youth in afterschool programs, learning researchers, artists/designers, psychologists, and sociologists helped create these guides over several years. We suggest that you use them to build community in clubs, classrooms, and camps; develop systems thinking and network science knowledge; plus promote curiosity and opportunities to discover.

A blue-green network against a black background

Featured Activities

Me & My Network

Youth will model their social connections as systems related to their identities. Youth will be able to understand the social relationships in their lives as part of social systems related to their identities and model these social systems as ego-networks.

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Ecology

Youth will understand that taking away nodes in a network sometimes means simply changing what the network looks like and other times can lead to a total collapse of the network (breaking all of the links/ties). They will be able to describe how a model gives insights to real world phenomena related to ecology.

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String Network

Youth will understand and demonstrate the importance of building and recognizing connections in a community. They will make a network model that reveals connections that may seem invisible until youth trace them. Youth will learn about the concept of six degrees of separation.

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Genealogy

Youth will understand how network models are used by geneticists to better understand genetic inheritance. They will be able to visualize how traits flow (or do not flow) from generation to generation by using a model family tree network, discern the direction of flow in relation to inheritance, and practice modeling the flow of inherited traits with an inheritance tree.

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About

Worlds of Connections (2018–2024) was a University of Nebraska–Lincoln-led Science Education Partnership Award (SEPA) funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). It was the third SEPA at UNL and aimed to continue the outstanding work by Judy Diamond and her team in the World of Viruses and Biology of Human projects. Our long-term goals were to 1) enhance the diversity of the bio-behavioral and biomedical workforce by increasing interest in network science among members of underrepresented minority communities and to 2) promote public understanding of the benefits of NIH-funded research for public health.

Hands of youth with brown skin draw pink and green network models on a large, white sheet of paper.

Overview

We coupled best practices in science education with innovative approaches.

Read overview and rationale

Aims

We pursued two specific aims to stimulate interest in and improve the accessibility of health science research.

About our aims

Goal

We strove to enhance public understanding of the role of network science in health research and public health.

UNL SEPA Projects

  1. 2007-2012

    Black text that reads "World of Viruses." The words "world of" are in a handwritten-style font, and the word "VIRUSES" is in all-caps serif font.

    The World of Viruses SEPA (2007-2012) educated the public about virology by conveying the importance of virology research and clinical trials to health, communities, and environments of people with diverse backgrounds; developed and provided community resources, including comics and apps, to learn more about virology; and engaged the public—especially middle- and high-school youth—to stimulate interest virology careers. 

  2. 2012-2018

    Black text that reads "Biology of Human." The words "Biology of" are in a handwritten-style font, and the word "HUMAN" is in all-caps serif font.

    The Biology of Human SEPA (2012-2018) worked to stimulate interest in and understanding of biomedical research's importance to health, communities, and environments of people from diverse backgrounds; establish partnerships among science educators, biomedical researchers, science journalists, and others to create dynamic educational resources focused on biomedical research developments and human biology; and increase youth interest in biomedical science.

  3. 2018-2023

    Worlds of Connection logo featuring a purple silhouette of someone wearing VR goggles, revealing a colorful pink network

    Worlds of Connections (2018-2023) is the most recent SEPA at UNL and builds on the work of the previous World of Viruses and BioHuman projects.

Trusted Partners

"SEPA" in large red serif font. To the right, "SCIENCE EDUCATION PARTNERSHIP AWARD" in capital black letters. Stretching across the bottom of both text blocks are the words "SUPPORTED BY THE NATIONAL INSTITUTES OF HEALTH" in gray capital letters.

This website is supported by the Worlds of Connections SEPA [R25GM129836] at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, funded by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences of the National Institutes of Health. This content is solely the responsibility of the creators and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health or the University of Nebraska.

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