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Computational thinking in life science education
- Source :
- PLoS Computational Biology, PLoS Computational Biology, Vol 10, Iss 11, p e1003897 (2014)
- Publication Year :
- 2014
-
Abstract
- 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 the curriculum of 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 paper 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.
- Subjects :
- Computer science
Logical reasoning
Bioinformatics
Science Policy
media_common.quotation_subject
Social Sciences
Temptation
Research and Analysis Methods
Science education
Biological Science Disciplines
Education
Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience
Database and Informatics Methods
Software
Sociology
Genetics
ComputingMilieux_COMPUTERSANDEDUCATION
Humans
lcsh:QH301-705.5
Molecular Biology
Curriculum
Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics
Information Science
media_common
Structure (mathematical logic)
Ecology
business.industry
Computational thinking
Computational Biology
Biology and Life Sciences
Focus (linguistics)
lcsh:Biology (General)
Computational Theory and Mathematics
Science Education
Modeling and Simulation
Engineering ethics
business
Algorithms
Subjects
Details
- ISSN :
- 15537358
- Volume :
- 10
- Issue :
- 11
- Database :
- OpenAIRE
- Journal :
- PLoS computational biology
- Accession number :
- edsair.doi.dedup.....545bb0e4f9f4b9762555f426e0887b29