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Computer Scientists at the Biology Lab Bench

Published: 24 February 2015 Publication History

Abstract

We present the development, implementation and evaluation of a new team-taught introductory computer science course focused on the topic of bioinformatics. Our course is unique when compared to other bioinformatics and interdisciplinary (biology and computer science) courses taught to undergraduates. Instead of analyzing data provided to them, students collect their own data at the biology lab bench and then analyze their data utilizing various bioinformatics tools in the computer lab. In addition, while other bioinformatics classes focus on programming, our course introduces other computer science topics relevant to the biological problems under investigation such as artificial intelligence, networks and databases. Our approach resulted in students acquiring an appreciation for how biology and computer science function synergistically.

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cover image ACM Conferences
SIGCSE '15: Proceedings of the 46th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education
February 2015
766 pages
ISBN:9781450329668
DOI:10.1145/2676723
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 24 February 2015

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  1. bioinformatics
  2. genetics

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SIGCSE '15 Paper Acceptance Rate 105 of 289 submissions, 36%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 1,595 of 4,542 submissions, 35%

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