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Mining the Databases and Solving Problems: Modeling Biology Learning on Biology Research
Sam Donovan
Visiting Assistant Professor, Biology Department
Assistant Director, BioQUEST Curriculum Consortium
Beloit College
Beloit, Wisconsin
donovans@beloit.edu
I want my students to get experience in what biologists actually do.... by taking the tools that
biologists use in the real world and finding ways to bring them into the classroom....Computers play a variety of roles in biological research (e.g., data acquisition and analysis, modeling and simulation) and I try to take advantage of those....here at Beloit, students expect to do research projects in all their science courses, and technology is highly integrated across the curriculum....Beloit is also the home (since 1986) of the BioQUEST Curriculum Consortium....BioQUEST materials emphasize giving students the opportunity to learn science by identifying and solving problems using the same methods and tools that research scientists use.... This includes the Biology Student WorkBench, which gives students (and researchers) web-based access to an integrated suite of bioinformatics resources. Within a common interface, students are able to do things like search databases, align sequences, predict restriction sites, build phylogenetic trees, and view 3-dimensional protein structures.... It has been my experience that most students come to a science course expecting to be told what the facts are.... Instead, I try to put students into situations where they need to make sense of data and apply theoretical models to explain phenomena. This helps them understand that doing science is actually a very dynamic, creative, and social process....
If you have any questions about BioQUEST, please contact me at:
donovans@beloit.edu
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