Independent Studies in Computational Biology

Introducing High School Students to Computational Biology

How can we introduce the methods of science to high school students and also include the culture and experience of doing science?

Our solution is to introduce students to the real world tools used in computational biology. A student with access to a fast Internet connection and a computer can be successful in the project without their school investing in any additional supplies.

High School Students

The Center has created a course tailored to magnet high school students that are ready and willing to accept the challenge of learning about cross-disciplinary science.

We have leveraged The Jackson Laboratory’s strong and evolving relationship with elite public science and math residential schools: the Maine School of Science and Mathematics (MSSM) and The North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics (NCSSM).

Distance Learning

The Jackson Laboratory has conducted a research oriented summer student program for over 78 years to encourage high school and college students to conduct independent, hypothesis-driven projects as members of a sponsoring scientist’s laboratory team.

We adapted this structure for use throughout the regular academic year with distance learning and web based tools so our research class could be taught remotely.

Lectures

Our students are prepared for conducting team oriented independent research via a lecture series that covers the core processes of:

  • Introductory Statistics
  • The R computer language
  • Asking meaningful Scientific Questions
  • Reading the scientific literature
  • How to give a scientific presentation
  • Writing a NIH grant proposal
  • Genetics of the laboratory mouse
  • Quantitative Trait Loci
  • Microarray analysis
  • Cluster analysis

In the first semester the students attend lectures given remotely from The Jackson Laboratory and work with an onsite instructor for supplemental materials throughout the school week. We introduce the students to Quantitative Trait Loci analysis, Microarray analysis, Pathway analysis, and other current computational biology methods through a series of journal clubs and lectures given by a top researcher in the field. The students learn to read and present scientific papers through their participation in journal clubs. The deliverables for the first semester are a review article on some of the papers they have read and a NIH formatted proposal for original team based research that they want to conduct in the second part of the course.

Example lectures:
Introduction to Genetics Research - Fall 2006 (PDF)
Introductory Statistics with R - Fall 2006 (PDF)

Research

In the second semester the students receive feedback and suggestions on the proposals and then conduct team research on the chosen aims. The students meet weekly with their mentors at The Jackson Laboratory using remote learning software to present their work and receive suggestions for the next steps in their research. The deliverable for this research is a poster, an oral presentation, and a written report.

Moodle

2008-2009 is our third year and we have learned a lot about the strengths and weaknesses of the distant learning techniques. We have solved some of the problems of distance and we have discovered ways to record lectures so that some of the timing problems can be eliminated (students that need to miss class, teachers that have overlapping meetings, getting multiple schools on the same time schedule, etc.) We have made an effort during the course to save all of the lecture material and example data sets in a course management system (Moodle) that all of the faculty and students have access to on a daily basis. We are now exploring this resource to build class modules for the high school classroom that will soon be posted on a public moodle. Our aim is to build modules for one class up to modules that will be for three weeks and include background information, teacher implementation suggestions, correlation with U.S. science standards, handouts, and follow-up. We are actively working with teachers and incorporating their feedback in the design of these modules.

Resources

ISCB Students

Members of the Center and an ISCB student attended the Centers for Systems Biology annual meeting in Princeton in 2008.

During the meeting several posters were presented describing the course and student’s research projects:

Independent Studies in Computational Biology: using distance learning to bring computational biology to the high school classroom (PDF 1.7Mb)
Randy Von Smith, Deborah McGann, Bob Gotwals, Keith Shockley, Shirngwern Tsaih, James Nadeau, Gary Churchill

A High School Search for Genes: Identifying Genes Significant to the Atherosclerosis Phenotype (PDF 3.5Mb)
Renee Symonds, Ryan Keating, Chunan Liang, Deborah McGann, Melissa Martin, Randy Von Smith, Gary Churchill

Bringing Computational Biology to the High School Classroom to Narrow QTL (PDF 220Kb)
Deborah McGann, Randy Smith, Hyuna Yang, Sharon Tsaih, Keith Shockley, Gary Churchill

Just Keep Swimming (PDF 15Kb)
The Maine School of Science and Mathematics student who attended the meeting, Renee Symonds, wrote a personal account of her experience.