Experience Network Science Through Play
We are surrounded by networks and they have an important role in our life. Computer networks connect our phones and laptops to apps running in the cloud. Transportation networks allow us to move from one place to the other, on the land, at sea, and in the air. We are all part of many social networks: our family, friends and the people that we work with. Biological networks, neural networks and utility network(Water, Gas, Electricity) are a few more examples of networks which we use every day and rely upon. Understanding how networks work and how to navigate them is one of the most important skill in the world today.
We build and use networks naturally and something about them is visually compelling:
- When they are designed correctly they are resilient: even if some parts of the network fail, it will find a way to deliver an acceptable service.
- They are scalable: Networks can grow and include billions of nodes and links, but still, function seamlessly.
- They can be decentralized and distributed: complex networks such as the internet are not owned by a single company, they are a collection of many private and public networks all speaking the same “language”. Similarly, transport networks are owned and managed by many different organizations, but still, passengers can reach any point in the world along complex routes.
- And finally, when analyzing and visualizing networks, one can discover many interesting insights and properties of the network such as alternative routes, influential nodes, local clusters, its density, and diameter. All of these insights allow people (and machines) to use and improve the network.
If you believe that network science is important and would like to educate you and your kids about it, please read on.
There are many popular board games such as Risk, Pandemic, and Ticket To Ride which constrain the movement on the board only between nodes of a graph and along with its links, however, I haven’t found any board game which takes the idea of network routing and uses it for movement.
I wanted kids to understand intuitively how network routing works and to let them engage with it, so I decided to design a board game myself.
Inspiration
Obviously, as a software engineer, I was inspired by the internet, and the way packets move swiftly between several IP addresses until they reach their destination. I also found the Dabbawalla network fascinating. Using a simple color-coding address scheme, 200,000 lunchboxes move every day along a predefined delivery network from home to work. Another artist who caught my attention was Mark Lombardi who spent days and months mapping conspiracy theories and drawing social-network-like diagrams.
But the first network which attracted me the most when I was a child is the London tube network. I can think of many reasons why the tube map is considered one of the main icons of London. First, every travel is a problem-solving exercise, how to get from A to B, the fastest way using multiple trains. I also liked the design: The composition is clean, the colors are bright, the curves and text are friendly and the crossing lines make cool geometric shapes.
Game Concept
Now that you’ve learned about my motivation and what inspired me, I hope you’ll understand the concept of the game and appreciate the design.
First, I wanted the game to include all types of network routing schemes: unicast, broadcast, multicast and geocast.
Another challenge was to make the game suitable for kids ages 6+. I knew that I couldn’t use the routing principles behind the internet, which are too complex for kids to grasp. I wanted a simple and colorful design, which will also reflect the beauty of networks.
If you look carefully at the map above, you’ll see that it’s possible to define any route as a sequence of colours. If we want to travel from the blue dot (node 1) to the grey dot (node 6), we can represent this as the sequence ‘Blue-Green’. We take the blue line to node 5 and then the green line to node 6.
Game Design
I wanted a familiar network and map, something which will be both educational and encourage kids to explore. Initially, I considered using a computer network but eventually, I decided to use a network of low-cost international flights.
What’s interesting about low-cost flights is that most of the time, they are not direct. They combine multi-hop flights from different airlines (a term called Interlining by the industry) and leverage the network to come up with low-cost alternatives.
There are some people who like the challenge of getting from A to B for as little as possible. They manage to successfully combine airlines deals to get to their final destination. It can take a bit of work, timing and lots of luck, but mainly, it requires good knowledge of how networks behave. The industry calls these people travel-hackers, but I like to call them network hackers, because the skills that they learn and use in traveling also apply to other networks, such as social networks and computer networks.
The board map includes 42 locations from six categories: family attractions (blue), nature (green), extreme (orange), urban (purple), historical sites (yellow) and engineering landmarks (black). The map also includes flight routes from six airlines with matching colours. Notice that from each location there can be no more than one outbound route for each colour.
The game includes 102 last-minute flight cards. Each card represents a route option, which can be either unicast, multicast or a broadcast route. There are also special cards: flight canceled card, flight upgrade card, and flight crashed card, and various flight complementary options. Every turn, players can choose between six last-minute flights to continue their travel.
Now, let’s see how good are you with finding routes? Imagine your current location is New-York. What are all the possible destinations that you can reach using these routes:
Now, try to use more than one card…one after the other, how many destinations can you travel to?
Finally, the game includes a web app with more than 1000 trivia questions.
When players reach a destination they can earn additional points by answering trivia questions regarding the 42 location which are on the map.
Summary
Network science is an academic field. Getting from A to B in London the fastest way is a fairly common algorithmic task that even young kids can achieve on their own. However, try to imagine the same task when the number of stations is 50 Billion!! That’s what it means to compute paths using today’s IP routing protocols. I believe that our brain was designed and shaped to helps us solve these kinds of problems, but our world is becoming increasingly complex and scaled, so some “training” is always helpful.
If you are interested in supporting the game and make it a reality, please clap, share, comment or support it in here: http://www.wayspotting.com/about or message me in Linkedin
Thanks for reading!
