Educational Technology

October 29, 2012

Researchers launch innovative, hands-on online tool for science education

Filed under: Educational Technology — admin @ 12:30 am

by UC San Diego

Computer scientists at the University of California, San Diego and at St. Petersburg Academic University in Russia, have developed a one-of-a-kind, hands-on online learning tool that weaves together for the first time science and programming education—and automatically grades homework too. “While modern biology is inundated with computation, biology students at U.S. universities are taught neither programming nor bioinformatics and as a result are unprepared for the challenges that await them in their own discipline,” said Pavel Pevzner, a computer science professor at the Jacobs School of Engineering at UC San Diego. “We provide a tool to fill that learning gap.” The new tool, called Rosalind, diverges from large-scale, online open education platforms such as Coursera and Udacity. Instead of listening to a lecture, students are required to complete increasingly difficult problems at their own pace. Researchers say it’s the only online tool using this method to teach science that they know of.

http://phys.org/news/2012-10-hands-on-online-tool-science.html

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