Marie turned in her first science project today. I have to say it was the idea of the century. Here it is, in her very own words (with the exception of her procedure, since blogger isn't allowing me to copy and paste). The project is titled, BFF: The Third Grade Social Network.
Background
In third grade, kids start to think that you can have only one friend. For example, sometimes my friends get upset if I’m not always their partner in class. Or maybe there is someone I want to invite to play with us at recess, but the kids I am already playing with don’t like that person. I chose to do this project because I wanted to prove to the third grade that we are all friends.
Question
Are we all connected by the friends that we share?
Hypothesis
I think we are all connected because we have friends, and our friends have friends, and they have friends, too.
Research
Before I could begin my project, I needed to learn about social networks and how to display one. My dad, James Thornbrue, is a real-life scientist. He taught me some of this stuff. I also had the help of library books.
The Complete Idiot’s Guide To Facebook taught me that it used to be hard to stay in contact with friends who moved away. Now, we have Facebook to help us. Facebook is a website that helps you send messages and pictures to people. Facebook is an example of a social network.
In A Smart Kid’s Guide to Social Networking Online, I learned that there are many different social networking websites for kids (Facebook is not for us). Using websites for kids can help us be safe, but we don’t need a website to stay connected. Third graders connect by playing on the playground, talking at church and on the phone, and visiting with each other at home.
Beautiful Visualization had some good examples of tag clouds. I decided to create a tag cloud to show how 3rd graders responded to one of the questions on my survey.
My dad James Thornbrue taught me that graphing a social network is like filling in the branches of a family tree.
My dad also taught me that scientist don’t just use their brains; they need tools to help them. For this project, I needed software tools such as Excel and Visone. We also used the same software used by the FBI and CIA to catch bad guys.
Sources
Kraynak , Joe and Mikal E. Belicove. The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Facebook. New York: The Penguin Group, 2010.
Jakubiak, David, J. A Smart Kids Guide to Social networking Online. New York: The Rosen Publishing Group, Inc., 2010.
Steele, Julie and Noah Illinksky, ed. Beautiful Visualization: Looking at data Through the Eyes of Experts. Sebastool: O’Rilly Media, Inc., 2010.
Thornbrue, James. Personal interview. March 23, 2011. April 2, 2011. April 18,2011.
Conclusion
My hypothesis was correct; we are all connected by the friends that we share, but not in the way that I thought. If you look at just the best friends graph, there is one group of friends that are only friends with each other. But if you add the other friends and people you would like to be friends with, everyone is connected!
Here are some other interesting facts:
· Most people are friends with people in their class.
· Girls generally have more friends than boys (as much as 13), but most boys and girls have 3 best friends.
· 3 sets of people want to be friends with each other and don’t even know it.
· Some boys have only girls as best friends, but no girls have only boys as best friends.
So the next time someone wants to play with us and the kids I am already playing with don’t like that person, I am going to tell them it’s okay because we are all friends anyway.
