How this course works
Six things are graded. Everything else on this page exists to get you ready for them.
Every week
Pen-and-paper exercise. In class, before anything has been defined, you work through a short worksheet with your own hands — cross the bridges, count the handshakes, break the network. We compare answers in the room and build the concept out of what you found. Many sheets end by handing you off to a lab notebook: a marimo notebook you open from a QR code on the sheet, which runs by machine the thing you have just done in pencil. Neither is one of the six graded items, and neither is submitted — but the lecture is built out of them, and the quiz assumes you were there.
Quiz. Each class opens with a short written quiz on the previous week. You work it out on paper, then submit through the course quiz form: the multiple-choice part goes in directly, and you photograph your handwritten working into the same form. Sign in with your Binghamton account — that is how the answer reaches your name. You may retake it, and your best attempt is the one that counts. Online students submit through Brightspace.
Lecture. Delivered by the instructor, starting from the worksheet.
Student Lecture. Once in the semester you teach, alone or in a team of up to three. Pick a topic from the published list and build a 15 to 20 minute lecture on it. An interactive part is required — a worksheet, an exercise the room works through, live coding. A slide presentation on its own does not count.
Assignments
Pair Notebook — individual, one per module for modules 2 through 6. A module taught as a one-on-one session with an AI tutor that runs in your terminal. A marimo notebook fills up beside it as you go, and that notebook, together with the log of the conversation, is what you hand in. What is read is how you reasoned, not whether your code ran. Needing hints is not penalized.
Group Mini-Project — in class, in teams of up to three, for modules 1 through 6. You apply the module’s ideas to real data in a shared repository. It is autograded once, in your team’s repository, and every member of the team receives that score. Module 1’s also ends with a three-minute presentation, and that is scored in the room.
Both are handed out and collected through Classroom 50, which gives you a private GitHub repository for each one. Nothing is emailed and nothing is uploaded by hand.
Project
A proposal, a presentation, and a final paper on a network topic of your choosing. Deadlines are in the syllabus.
Exam
One take-home final exam covering every module, multiple choice, submitted through Brightspace during exam week.
Grading
| Component | Weight |
|---|---|
| Quiz | 10 |
| Student Lecture | 10 |
| Pair Notebook | 10 |
| Group Mini-Project | 10 |
| Exam | 30 |
| Project | 30 |
There are no bonus points: the hundred points in that table are the whole grade.
Discord is for questions, announcements and community. Nothing on Discord is graded.
Resources
- Mark Newman, Networks (Second Edition), Oxford University Press, 2018
- Filippo Menczer, Santo Fortunato, and Clayton A. Davis, A First Course in Network Science, Cambridge University Press, 2020
- James Bagrow and Yong-Yeol Ahn, Working with Network Data: A Data Science Perspective, Cambridge University Press, 2024