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Bioinformatics Lesson Plans and Activities Bank
The bioinformatics activities and lesson plans in this database, written by high school teachers in an outreach program from Franklin & Marshall College, can be adapted for classroom use. The lessons are based on content and inquiry-based activities given in a week-long professional development summer seminar in bioinformatics. The subject areas are: computer science, biology, evolution, genetics, genomics, phylogenetics, and DNA and RNA. Many lesson plans, such as the Medical Problem Solving Webquest, reflect the content of the summer seminar, which focused on medical problem solving at a local clinic that uses bioinformatics to find the genetic causes of disease in Amish and Mennonite children. Other lesson plans cover a variety of different topics. For example, a Visual Basic DNA Decoder lesson has students write a Visual Basic computer program that can be used to transcribe a DNA Codon into mRNA, and then translate the mRNA sequence into the correct amino acid. In a Fish Evolution lab, students use SDS-PAGE to analyze different fish proteins and to predict the evolutionary relationships among different fish. Each activity contains a summary, a lesson plan, curricular documents for students and teachers, and the time needed to complete the lesson. A Franklin & Marshall College faculty member reviewed each activity for scientific accuracy. Educators must first register to gain access to the materials. Once they have registered, users can comment on the materials and can also contribute new bioinformatics activities, which would undergo a review process.
Program Director: Richard A. Fluck, Ph.D.
Award Years: 1988, 2000, 2008
Summary: Franklin & Marshall College is a private baccalaureate institution in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Its HHMI-supported educational initiatives focus on infusing bioinformatics—a field that combines biology, computer science, and mathematics to investigate data-rich areas in genetics and other sciences—into the curriculum. Highlights include:
- Creating an interdisciplinary major in bioinformatics.
- Hiring new faculty members and retraining current ones to introduce cross-disciplinary perspectives into current biology, chemistry, and computer science courses.
- Expanding the Howard Hughes Bioinformatics Scholars program at the college and at Lancaster's Clinic for Special Children in Strasburg, Pennsylvania. The clinic, which treats and researches genetic and metabolic disorders among Amish and Old Order Mennonite communities, serves as a valuable off-site resource to train students in bioinformatics. Students selected to work at the clinic perform research alongside medical professionals and analyze data to identify the distinctive patterns of mutation, deletion, or repetition that might underlie these rare metabolic disorders
- Providing an annual week-long professional development seminar in bioinformatics that offers cutting-edge content and inquiry-based activities to selected high school biology teachers in the Lancaster area. The teachers develop classroom lesson plans based on seminar content.
- Offering a summer research fellowship program for four high school biology, chemistry, computer science, or applied mathematics teachers. The program, which allows the teachers to work one-on-one with an F&M faculty member, is designed to help educators better meet state and national standards in science education, which increasingly emphasize scientific process and inquiry-based research.