Having my younger son explore a fantastic website shared by Bill Hanage explaining how social distancing changes network connections

Yesterday I saw a tweet from Bill Hanage linking to a really interesting website:

You want to know why schooling plans that introduce more contacts are bad? Look at this https://t.co/vhwjJy02sF

— Bill Hanage (@BillHanage) September 9, 2020

From just a little bit of time on the site, I thought having my younger son read and play with some of the ideas would make a great project. So I asked him to spend 20 min reading and exploring, and then we talked.

Here are his initial thoughts:

One of the things he thought was interesting was the idea of 3 and 6 degrees of separation when you have a few connections and how much the network changes when you just add one connection (on average) per person:

Another thing he thought was interesting was the companion site that allowed you to modify connections in the network. Here he looked at the size of the largest group when you made the change from connections with only essential works to again adding 1 connection on average for everyone:

I really like how the ideas of network connections are explained on this site. Their work makes a fairly complex idea accessible to everyone – including kids. Thanks to Bill Hanage for sharing this site!