Teaching Computational Thinking Through Bio-Design (Abstract Only)

We are developing ways to teach computational thinking through interaction with tangible digital tools for synthetic biology. Inspired in part by Jeannette Wing's (Wing 2008) notion of the essence and pervasiveness of computational thinking, a growing community within SIGCSE is exploring tools that encourage computational thinking that don't use traditional computer science terminology or computer programming (Basawapna 2013, Daily 2014, Freeman 2014, Miller 2014, Wolz 2011). However, that community has not yet explored how to teach computational thinking through bio-design. Synthetic biology is a relatively new research field where scientists engineer living organisms to exhibit new behaviors. Biologists arrange and combine BioBricks, sequences of DNA that exhibit a behavior, sense an environmental factor, or indicate the beginning or end of a larger sequence. Bio-design not only incorporates traditional principles of computational thinking (abstraction, modularity, design/build/test), but also introduces new challenges that force the user to apply these principles in new ways. Interacting with biology can thus 1) help deepen understanding for people who are proficient in computational thinking, 2) provide a platform for introduction to computational thinking for the first time. Because most bio-design is performed in a wetlab by experienced biologists, we focus now on designing and developing low-barrier digital tools for interacting with biology. We present SynFlo (Okerlund 2016), a tangible interactive system for bio-design that mimics a real-life biological wetlab protocol and we discuss the properties of SynFlo and bio-design in general that encourage computational thinking.