Teaching modelling to first-year biology students

Time: 11:10 - 11:30  The field of biology relies heavily on computations. This is not well reflected in education and the current undergraduate curriculum has little computational content. This results in a discontinuity... [ view full abstract ]

Time: 11:10 - 11:30  

The field of biology relies heavily on computations. This is not well reflected in education and the current undergraduate curriculum has little computational content. This results in a discontinuity between the education received by the students and the problems they face after graduation. The end result is that the students are not equipped to meet the requirements of modern research nor the tasks awaiting them in the industry. To remedy this problem, a new course, BIOS 1100 - Introduction to Modelling in Biology, will be held for the first time at the University of Oslo in fall 2017.
Currently, no available book combines biology and programming at an introductory level in a satisfactory way. Most textbooks teach both topics separately or expect the reader to know either biology or programming from before. We have therefore written our own textbook to be used as curriculum in this course. This book aims to teach programming and modelling to first year biology students through examples from biology. The book is based on a philosophy of just-in-time teaching where the programming concepts are introduced just when they are needed to solve the problem in hand. This puts the programming content in an unusual order in comparison to the traditional computer science curriculum while keeping the biology students motivated by the problems they solve. The examples are mainly from the three branches of biology: population dynamics, bioinformatics and evolution.
The purpose is to give biology students a practical understanding of programming and mathematical models. This will enable the understanding of mathematical models and encourage critical thinking. Programming allows much more realistic and inspiring problems to be addressed, enabling students to work on current research topics early on. The textbook is written using DocOnce (created by Hans Petter Langtangen), which enables us to compile the book to both LaTeX/PDF, HTML and Jupyter Notebooks.