The goals of this site and its lessons are to help students begin, learn, and then succeed in using data science practices within a Life Science background. The lessons are designed to be used whether a student thrives in a classroom setting at a college or university; or whether the student is more free-range… a self-motivated learner. The lessons can be used for students to learn on-line and on their own pace (except for the homework) but are also good for students that want the feedback and fluency that comes with active learning. The course works when offered in a classroom or online. Instructors and participants will continue to build and share the material, making it maximally useful to the broader audience of biologists who want to learn how to use programming and bioinformatics software. We are committed to helping folks who are complete beginners, and welcome those who already have some programming background.

To encourage folks to use this material, all of the general material on this site is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution License and all programs are licensed under the MIT License.

Be sure to let us know what you think so we can be sure to get you the best experience.

Examples of who we are trying to help include:

Allen: An undergraduate student in a biology related field who either realizes that computers are going to be important in whatever area of biology he ends up working or likes computers and thinks learning about them be more fun than the other available electives. He has never programmed before and doesn’t really know what a database is.

Jenny: A graduate student with a background in doing hands on biology either in the lab or the field. Now that she’s in graduate school she’s realized that managing the data she’s collecting in a reasonable way is going to be important (working with the hodge podge of poorly structured spreadsheets that her lab uses is awful), and doing all of the analysis that she needs to conduct for her dissertation seems like it would be a lot easier if it could be automated.

Paul: A faculty member with little computer background who knows that computing has become central to his area of research and he needs to have a rough idea of how his students are working the programming magic they do for projects. Even better he’d like to get to the point where he can really engage and help out.