Workshop: Incorporating Genomics into
 Undergraduate Curricula at Wheaton College
 
 Report to NSF | Genomics | Wheaton College

Approximately 20 professors interested in discussing pedagogical problems around introducing genomics to undergraduate curricula met at Wheaton College. A "before" and "after" format was used, with a year having elapsed between meetings to allow educators to try ideas in their classrooms and then to evaluate them.

Workshop I, June 2002

Workshop II, June 2003

Interdisciplinary collaborations in the sciences are common in many research settings but can be difficult to implement in undergraduate classrooms. For example, bioinformatics for undergraduates tends to focus on pre-existing software and usually does not require interactions between programmers and biologists. The emerging field of genomics (computational analysis of DNA sequences) requires cooperation between programmers and biologists especially if new hypotheses are to be explored. In particular computer science majors interested in genomics could benefit from interactions with biologists who will be using their programs. Likewise biology majors have much to gain by working with programmers to get optimal results and to explore new hypotheses.

We are demonstrating that collaborations on an undergraduate level may be set up in a programmer/user format, via the linking of our courses "Algorithms" and "Genetics". The projects for those courses as well as our pedagogical techniques for supporting collaborations are worth sharing with other educators. These two workshops "before" and "after" (June 2002 and June 2003) were to encourage experimentation in the classroom followed by reflection on and evaluation of ideas.

These workshops were funded by NSF DUE-0126643.

If you have questions, please contact Betsey. D. Dyer at bdyer@wheatoncollege.edu.

Report to NSF | Genomics | Wheaton College