NEW: Summer 2008 Teacher Opportunity
This is an exciting time for science education! A user-friendly cyberinfrastructure will mean that for the first time in history everyone can work with the same data using the same tools in the same timeframe as high-level researchers. The goal of our Education Outreach and Training (EOT) is to ensure that everyone – students, teachers and faculty, from middle school to graduate school – will have the access and training to use these data and participate in research in real time.
Computational Thinking in Plant Biology in Higher Education
We will provide mechanisms to integrate computational thinking with biology from community colleges through graduate school with the ultimate goal of developing broad-based, interdisciplinary programs in Computational Thinking in Plant Biology. Our approach is twofold: 1) Directly involve undergraduate and graduate students from multiple disciplines in core IST and GC teams where they will learn how to tackle and solve grand challenge problems in plant biology through multidisciplinary teamwork. Students at any institution will have access through summer internship programs, STATCOM teams, and iPlant Action Teams: dispersed multidisciplinary teams that develop a joint project and contribute their analysis modules to the collaborative. 2) Engage educators nationally in teaching computational thinking in biology, building on the work of many established programs nationwide. This will be done through iPC educational symposia, workshops held at annual meetings of professional societies, such as ASPB, BSA, and SIGCSE, and community discussions via online tools.
K-12 Education Programs
The goal is to empower teachers to introduce computational thinking into their existing curricula and produce a new generation of students who understand not only how to use computers, but also how to apply computational processes to important biological questions. This will be accomplished through intensive six-week long K-12 teacher research experiences and curricula development projects; 2.5-day workshops held within communities to enable teacher interns to train other teachers to use the teaching modules they developed; year-long partnerships between graduate student fellows in life sciences and high school teachers to implement the curricula and five to six-week long high school student research experiences. Initially our programs will focus on high school teachers and students. However, we intend to work with teachers and our EOT Advisory Board to develop programs for elementary and middle schools as well.
Dissemination of Materials
The Dolan DNA Learning Center (DNALC) will embed outreach materials and teaching modules within the iPlant portal, thus tightly linking research and education. During the first year, DNALC will produce video and audio podcasts to publicize the project and to provide students and teachers a window on the Grand Challenge identification process. The DNALC will work with Grand Challenge Teams to develop video interviews and narrated animations that explain the conceptual background and historical development of each Grand Challenge, as well as to develop example data sets and educational interfaces to Discovery Environments. A nationwide workshop program will train science teachers how to use iPlant tools for student projects that support integrative and computational thinking.
