The application submitted by the Department of Computational Biology for the call for proposals "Innovative teaching and learning concepts: Innovation plus" of the MWK was approved. The MWK will fund the concept presented in the application with almost 29 thousand euros over a period of two years.
The project in brief
The life sciences have developed into strongly quantitative-digital disciplines: Modern high-throughput methods generate large amounts of data in a short time, which can only be analyzed with the help of powerful computers and complex algorithms.
Advances in research and development are already frequently based on the use of artificial intelligence.
The software required for this is increasingly being developed and made available online freely and cooperatively across disciplines, countries and time by members of the international scientific community.
In order to be able to successfully practice their profession later on, students of all sciences must learn to move in this community, to use scientific software and to participate in shaping it themselves.
The goal of our newly designed module Introduction to the Julia programming language and Open Source development is to impart these competencies.
In a first phase, students with advanced programming experience will be trained to become team leaders, who in a second phase will guide fellow students with no prior knowledge and support them in the acquisition of competencies.
Students learn in a question- and problem-oriented manner while working in teams on real software projects.
Students publish their results upon completion of the module.
Students are introduced to open source and open science practices and contribute to the creation of free, transparent, and sustainably usable scientific software.
The goal of the project
Open source software is created in Internet-based, open spaces with their own ecosystems of platforms, tools, and methods that enable collaborative work without location and time constraints.
These spaces form a virtual working environment, comparable to laboratories or greenhouses in the analog world, but to which students in traditionally rather computer technology-remote courses of study rarely have contact. The goal of our project is to empower as many students as possible to safely navigate this environment. We want students to benefit from developments in their field, access important resources, and contribute to methodological and scientific progress.
In addition, we want to strengthen Open Science as a scientific practice with our planned double module. We see our students as developers and researchers of tomorrow, who will contribute to not only create data, knowledge and methods, but also to keep them transparent, accessible and sustainable!
