ABSTRACT
We present the curriculum and evaluation of a pilot Biology-themed CS1 course offering at a large public university. Inspired by Harvey Mudd's CS 5 Green, we adapt CS1 + Bio to fit the needs of our student body, which is much more typical for those US institutions that produce the bulk of the nation's CS undergraduate degrees. This course was team-taught by a computer science professor and a biology professor, and combined typical CS1 topics with relevant biology content. Our initial offering attracted students who would not otherwise have taken CS1, and was the only one of our three CS1 courses where more students reported planning to major in CS after the course than before it.
- Christine Alvarado, Zachary Dodds, and Ran Libeskind-Hadas. 2012. Increasing Women's Participation in Computing at Harvey Mudd College. Inroads, Vol. 3, 4 (2012), 55--64. Google ScholarDigital Library
- American Association for the Advancement of Science. 2011. Vision and Change in Undergraduate Biology Education: A Call to Action. (2011). http://visionandchange.org/finalreport/Google Scholar
- William Bialek and David Botstein. 2004. Introductory science and mathematics education for 21st-century biologists. Science, Vol. 303, 5659 (2004), 788--790.Google Scholar
- Jane E. Caldwell. 2007. Clickers in the Large Classroom: Current Research and Best-Practice Tips. CBE Life Sciences Education Vol. 6, 1 (March. 2007), 9--20.Google ScholarCross Ref
- K. Clark, I. Karsch-Mizrachi, D. J. Lipman, J. Ostell, and E. W. Sayers. 2016. GenBank. Nucleic Acids Res., Vol. 44, D1 (Jan. 2016), 67--72.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Catherine H. Crouch and Eric Mazur. 2001. Peer Instruction: Ten Years of Experience and Results. American Journal of Physics Vol. 69, 9 (2001), 970--77.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Quintin Cutts, Angela Carbone, and Kelsey van Haaster. 2004. Using an Electronic Voting System to Promote Active Reflection on Coursework Feedback Proceedings of ICCE 2004. APSCE.Google Scholar
- Zachary Dodds, Ran Libeskind-Hadas, and Eliot Bush. 2010. When CS 1 is Biology 1: Cross-disciplinary Collaboration as CS Context Proceedings of the 15th Annual Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education (ITiCSE). 219--223. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Zachary Dodds, Ran Libeskind-Hadas, and Eliot Bush. 2012. Bio1 as CS1: Evaluating a Cross-disciplinary CS Context Proceedings of the 17th Annual conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education (ITiCSE). ACM, 268--272. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Harvey Mudd College. 2015. Common Data Set. Online at https://www.hmc.edu/institutional-research/institutional-statistics/common-data-set/. (2015).Google Scholar
- Sharon K Lanning, Sonya L Ranson, and Rita M Willett. 2008. Communication skills instruction utilizing interdisciplinary peer teachers: program development and student perceptions. J Dent Educ, Vol. 72, 2 (Feb. 2008), 172--182. 1145/3059009.3059029Google ScholarCross Ref
- University of California at San Diego, Saint Petersburg Academic University, and the Russian Academy of Sciences. {n. d.}. Rosalind, a platform for learning bioinformatics through problem solving. http://rosalind.info. ({n. d.}). http://rosalind.info/Google Scholar
- Daniel Zingaro. 2010. Experience Report: Peer Instruction in Remedial Computer Science Proceedings of World Conference on Educational Multimedia, Hypermedia & Telecommunications(Ed-Media), Jan Herrinton and Bill Hunger (Eds.). AACE, 5030--35. Online at http://editlib.org/p/36184/Google Scholar
- Emile Zuckerkandl, Richard T Jones, and Linus Pauling. 1960. A comparison of animal hemoglobins by tryptic peptide pattern analysis. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. 46, 10 (1960), 1349--1360.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Stuart Zweben and Betsy Bizot. 2017. 2016 Taulbee Survey. Computing Research News Vol. 29, 5 (2017). http://cra.org/crn/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/2017/05/2016-Taulbee-Survey.pdfGoogle Scholar
Index Terms
- A Biology-themed Introductory CS Course at a Large, Diverse Public University
Recommendations
Initial Experiences with a CS + Law Introduction to Computer Science (CS 1)
ITiCSE '17: Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science EducationWe present the curriculum, pilot offering, and initial evaluation of a CS + Law based CS 1 course that was team taught by a Computer Science professor and a law school professor. Relevant legal topics were interwoven through the course.
The results from ...
Tracking an innovation in introductory CS education from a research university to a two-year college
SIGCSE '05: Proceedings of the 36th SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science educationInnovations in teaching and learning computer science education can easily be overly-specific to a given institution, or type of institution. For example, an innovation may require special hardware, or may make assumptions about the background of the ...
Lessons learned from a PLTL-CS program
SIGCSE '11: Proceedings of the 42nd ACM technical symposium on Computer science educationThe Peer-Led Team Learning (PLTL) approach has previously been shown to be effective in recruiting and retaining students, particularly under-represented students, in undergraduate introductory CS courses. In PLTL, small groups of students are led by an ...
Comments