Good morning.
It’s a rainy day ahead for Whitewater, with a high temperature of eighty-five, and thundershowers in the afternoon.
School’s about to resume, and each school day comprises hundreds of interactions between students, teachers, and visitors. In France, researchers decided to place radio frequency tags on students, to map the encounters between them during a day:
By putting RFIDs on children and monitoring their interactions over a single day, researchers have produced one of the most detailed analyses ever of the roiling, boiling social free-for-all that is school.
The findings, published August 16 in Public Library of Science One, document the minute-by-minute interactions and locations of 232 children aged 6 to 12 and 10 teachers.
Reconfigured as pulsing network maps and flows of color are the universal experiences of middle school: the between-class rush, playground cliques, snatched hallway conversation and the fifth-graders who are too cool for everyone else.
See, Visualized: A School Day as Data.
And here’s how those many encounters appear: