Bioinformatics Goes to School—New Avenues for Teaching Contemporary Biology

Affiliation: Training Team, EMBL-European Bioinformatics Institute, Wellcome Trust Genome Campus, Hinxton, United Kingdom

Abstract

Since 2010, the European Molecular Biology Laboratory's (EMBL) Heidelberg laboratory and the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) have jointly run bioinformatics training courses developed specifically for secondary school science teachers within Europe and EMBL member states. These courses focus on introducing bioinformatics, databases, and data-intensive biology, allowing participants to explore resources and providing classroom-ready materials to support them in sharing this new knowledge with their students.

In this article, we chart our progress made in creating and running three bioinformatics training courses, including how the course resources are received by participants and how these, and bioinformatics in general, are subsequently used in the classroom. We assess the strengths and challenges of our approach, and share what we have learned through our interactions with European science teachers.

Citation: Wood L, Gebhardt P (2013) Bioinformatics Goes to School—New Avenues for Teaching Contemporary Biology. PLoS Comput Biol 9(6): e1003089. doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1003089

Editor: Fran Lewitter, Whitehead Institute, United States of America

Published: June 13, 2013

Copyright: © 2013 Wood, Gebhardt. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Funding: The authors received no specific funding for this article.

Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

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