FinNet is an outreach extension of a collaborative interdisciplinary project supported by the National Science Foundation's CDI program (Grant Number BCS-0941487) and the FODAVA program (Grant Number FODAVA-0937070). The CDI program is part of an initiative to bring computational thinking into other disciplines. The FODAVA program focuses on foundations for visual analytics. The data used in FinNet comes from the Shark Bay Dolphin Research Project (SBDRP), which has been monitoring dolphins in Shark Bay, Australia since 1984. We had access to over 14,000 surveys, each lasting 5 to 10 minutes, that present a snapshot of dolphin associations. We specifically used a subset of 104 dolphins to display the static networks we needed for FinNet.
Figure 1
FinNet was written in Adobe Flash Builder using Flex 4 and Flare's data visualization library. The software can be broken down into 2 sections: Structured investigation and unstructured exploration. Students can choose which section they wish to use from the welcome screen (see Figure 1). The investigation section is divided into three learning modules that teach a number of computer science and biology concepts and culminate in quiz-style feedback on topics just taught. After choosing the investigation section, children can choose which learning module they wish to use (see Figure 2. Each module builds on previous modules, and increases in level of difficulty.
Figure 2
The last page of each module has quiz style feedback to test children's knowledge of the biology and computer science topics that were just presented (see Figure 3). These quizzes contained one \emph{challenge question} that was designed to be a more difficult test of the concepts covered in that learning module.
Figure 3
The important computer science concepts relate to networks and graph components (nodes and edges), graph topology (star versus complete), path length and shortest path, and density. The key biological topics are all related to social structure of dolphin networks and include fission-fusion, dolphin's tool usage, and sex-based homophily.
