Bioinformatics in high school biology

One of the main topics in today’s Education Committee meeting of the International Society for Computational Biology was how to get bioinformatics integrated into high-school biology classes.

The tutorial workshop on Saturday was reported as being very successful, with the teachers being enthusiastic about the possibilities of integrating bioinformatics into their courses.  One problem that was pointed out is that AP bio students resist learning anything that won’t be on the test, so we decided to start the process of talking with the College Board about changing the AP curriculum and AP test to include some bioinformatics.  We expect this to be a slow process.

We now have a task force that will be looking at the AP curriculum and trying to find ways to incorporate bioinformatics into teaching that curriculum (so not adding topics, but adding more hands-on learning to the pedagogy). We think that this is a more fruitful approach than trying to add a bioinformatics unit to the courses.

We’ll be relying on the official information about the AP Biology course from the College Board.

I’m hoping that the teachers who attended the workshop will do some blogging on their attempts to include bioinformatics in their own courses.  Having 10 or 20 teachers experimenting with the pedagogy is going to be much more valuable than theoretical thinking about what should be done.

Note: I’m going to add new thoughts to this post as comments, rather than editing the main post, partly because I expect to be dribbling ideas in over the next couple of months. At some point I may start a new post with an actual proposal for discussion.

Note for our international audience: The AP curriculum is a program in the United States for “Advanced Placement” and is an attempt to get first-year college courses taught in high schools.  Many US universities provide college credit for AP courses, if students score sufficiently well on the associated AP test.  The content of the AP Bio courses is fairly standardized (to match the test), but the ways in which it is taught vary considerably. The International Society for Computational Biology is interested in integrating bioinformatics into high-school biology worldwide, but that was too daunting a task to start with.  We decided to start with the region where we had the most volunteers (USA) and see what we could do there.  Hopefully, anything we develop for AP biology will be usable elsewhere, at least in places where instruction is in English.