TY - GEN
T1 - What every biologist should know about computer science
AU - Chor, Benny
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015.
PY - 2015
Y1 - 2015
N2 - We join the increasing call to take computational education of life science students a step further, beyond teaching mere programming and employing existing software tools.We describe a new course, focusing on enriching life science students with abstract, algorithmic and logical thinking, and exposing them to the computational culture. The design, structure and content of our course are influenced by recent efforts in this area, collaborations with life scientists, and our own instructional experience. Specifically, we suggest that an effective course of this nature should: (1) devote time to explicitly reflect upon computational thinking processes, resisting the temptation to drift to purely practical instruction, (2) focus on discrete notions, rather than on continuous ones, and (3) have basic programming as a prerequisite, so students need not be preoccupied with elementary programming issues.We strongly recommend that the mere use of existing bioinformatics tools and packages should not replace hands-on programming. Yet, we suggest that programming will mostly serve as a means to practice computational thinking processes. This talk deals with the challenges and considerations of such computational education for life science students. It also describes a concrete implementation of the course, and encourages its use by others.
AB - We join the increasing call to take computational education of life science students a step further, beyond teaching mere programming and employing existing software tools.We describe a new course, focusing on enriching life science students with abstract, algorithmic and logical thinking, and exposing them to the computational culture. The design, structure and content of our course are influenced by recent efforts in this area, collaborations with life scientists, and our own instructional experience. Specifically, we suggest that an effective course of this nature should: (1) devote time to explicitly reflect upon computational thinking processes, resisting the temptation to drift to purely practical instruction, (2) focus on discrete notions, rather than on continuous ones, and (3) have basic programming as a prerequisite, so students need not be preoccupied with elementary programming issues.We strongly recommend that the mere use of existing bioinformatics tools and packages should not replace hands-on programming. Yet, we suggest that programming will mostly serve as a means to practice computational thinking processes. This talk deals with the challenges and considerations of such computational education for life science students. It also describes a concrete implementation of the course, and encourages its use by others.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84944580644&partnerID=8YFLogxK
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AN - SCOPUS:84944580644
SN - 9783319190471
T3 - Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
BT - Bioinformatics Research and Applications - 11th International Symposium, ISBRA 2015, Proceedings
A2 - Harrison, Robert
A2 - Li, Yaohang
A2 - Măndoiu, Ion
PB - Springer Verlag
T2 - 11th International Symposium on Bioinformatics Research and Applications, ISBRA 2015
Y2 - 7 June 2015 through 10 June 2015
ER -