Expanding Undergraduate Exposure to Computer Science Subfields: Resources and Lessons from a Hands-on Computational Biology Workshop

Computational biology is an exciting and ever-widening interdisciplinary field. Expanding the participation of undergraduate students in this field will help to inspire and train the next generation of scientists necessary to support this growing area. However, students at smaller institutions, such as those focused on undergraduate education, may not have access to courses related to or even faculty interested in computational biology. Providing more opportunities for such undergraduate students to be exposed to computational biology, or other subfields within computer science, will be important for ensuring these students are included in the pipeline of scientists contributing to these diverse fields. To this end, we hosted a computational biology workshop that brought together undergraduate students from three different liberal arts colleges. The goal of the workshop was to provide an introduction to how computer science can be used to help answer important problems in biology. A diverse set of six faculty members from different institutions each created and taught a hands-on module as an introduction to a different area of computational biology at the workshop. We describe how we went about organizing this undergraduate workshop, summarize the workshop materials that are freely available, and discuss the outcomes and lessons learned from the workshop. We further propose that the workshop structure used is adaptable to other subfields of computer science. Workshop materials available at the workshop website: https://sites.google.com/carleton.edu/compbioworkshop2018/home.