1 What’s a network?

Network is a representation of human relationships. It’s usually depicted as a set of dotes & lines between these dots.
Each line states that 2 dots (students in our case) worked together during a certain project.
Check a nice example of how graphs work on Harry Potter example link

2 What are we going to investigate?

  1. How your network of connections evolved through course?
  2. Did our devious plan work exactly as we plan?

2.1 Wait-wait-wait. Devious plan?!

YES

First year students (*especially in COVID times) tend to work within their study group, thus forming a closed community.
We decided to change it.

During the first 4 ITP projects we tried to get you acquinted with as many students from your course as possible.

And then we gave you 2 project where you were supposed to find a team yourself.
Was this scheme able to change tendency to form a closed community?
Have you become closer to students from other study groups?

Let’s see

2.2 Which ITP projects we have included?

  • Case 1 Imperator
  • Case 2 Arrival
  • Case 3 TSQ
  • Case 4 CS.Money
  • Case 5 Google
  • CORE report

3 Network of Case 1 Imperator

During the first case you were randomly distributed into 34 teams.
Let’s see how it looks on a graph.

There are many isolated teams on a graphs, right?
You can play a bit with a graph - find your self or use top-down menu with study group numbers. Size of node indicated final mark on ITP course - the bigger the dot - the higher the mark. Use zoom in - zoom out (mouse) and click on nodes to find names.

4 Network of Case 2 Arrival

In the next case we decided to allocate you in accordance with Belbin Team Roles score. And we created “problematic” teams - with a duplication of Action or Thinking roles.
Let’s see how the structure looks now. We will add a new layer - team connection for case 2. Network changes dramatically - now people that have zero connections from case 1 are located on the sides on the graphs.
And students that were working previosly together are placed closer to the center.

5 Network of Case 3 TSQ

In this case we also used Belbin Team Roles score. And we created “ideal” teams - with no duplication of Action or Thinking roles, medium sized.
We will add a new layer - team connection for case 3. Network becomes more and more complicated.
We start seeing cluster of people from the same groups or from differents groups.

6 Network of Case 4 TSQ

We are introducing new complication - dealing with teams of bigger size (7-8). The problem of free riders becomes evident. More clusters appear.

7 Network of Case 5 Google

Google case gave you an opportunity to work with people you like.

The choice was yours. Let’s see how it impacted the network - will we see people from the same study groups as clusters?

Magic happens!

We see both teams from the same study groups (dot are similarly colored) & multi-group teams. We surely see the isolates as well - students who skipped this task.

8 CORE report

Let’s check with this composition of network stays till the final and the most complicated task - CORE report text & defence

AND THE MAGIC STOPS You can clearly see that for CORE report we have mostly teams of students from the same group.
If variation occurs it is mainly because of freerider team decided to take in the last week or, on contrary, an extremely powerful student being added as a key player…