This short paper presents an educational approach to teaching three popular methods for encoding DNA sequences: one-hot encoding, binary encoding, and integer encoding. Aimed at bioinformatics and computational biology students, our learning intervention focuses on developing practical skills in implementing these essential techniques for…

This article considers starting with an existing SIMIODE modeling scenario [Winkel, B. (2015). 1-031-CoolIt-ModelingScenario. SIMIODE (Version 2.0). "QUBES Educational Resources." https://doi.org/10.25334/3WG8-EC31] that develops Newton's law of cooling by considering data on the cooling of a beaker of water in a room, and expanding upon…

Biochemistry is a data-heavy discipline, yet teaching students to work with large datasets is absent from many undergraduate Biochemistry programs. Ensuring that future generations of students are confident in tackling problems using big data first requires that educators become comfortable teaching big data skills. The activity described herein…

The process of diffusion is intimately related to random molecular displacement and is central to many problems in chemistry. Here, we provide an intuitive derivation of the diffusion equation based on the analysis of the random trajectories of particles generated and plotted by simple MATLAB and Python scripts. The codes are very simple and…

Human-driven carbon emissions have resulted in increased levels of dissolved carbon dioxide in the Earth's oceans. This dissolved carbon dioxide reacts with water to form carbonic acid, which impacts ocean acidity as well as the solubility of carbonate-containing compounds, with far-reaching impacts on marine ecosystems and the human communities…

Python is a free, text-based programming language that has already been used by those who do physics research to great effect. But students can also learn to use it and, through its use, learn other aspects of physics--especially ones that are difficult or impossible to perform as physical labs. This article serves as a most-fundamental start for…

Introducing elementary concepts of nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy (NMR) to a beginner can be challenging. Using an interactive graphical platform can greatly aid in demonstrating key concepts in such cases. This paper aims to bridge this gap in teaching basic NMR spectroscopy through simple standalone interactive Python programs or a…

Laboratory automation and data science are valuable new skills for all chemists, but most pedagogical activities involving automation to date have focused on upper-level coursework. Herein, we describe a combined computational and experimental lab suitable for a first-year undergraduate general chemistry course, in which these topics are…

The Arduino is a popular and useful tool in STEM and physics education. Teacher demonstrations, laboratory and home work are supported by an incredibly wide range of application examples for a low cost. Since the heart of the Arduino board is an industrial microcontroller, it is a good chance to teach the basics of the related rules, standards and…

Learning standards for K-12 science education emphasize the importance of engaging students in practices that scientists perform in their profession. K-12 teachers are expected to engage students in scientific modeling, which entails constructing, testing, evaluating, and revising their own models of science phenomena while pursuing an epistemic…

The Poisson distribution describes the probability of a certain number of events occurring in an interval of time when the occurrence of the individual events is independent of one another and the events occur with a fixed mean rate. Probably the best-known example of the Poisson distribution in the physics curriculum is the temporal distribution…

This article reports a workshop from the 2021 IUBMB/ASBMB Teaching Science with Big Data conference held virtually in June 2021 where participants learned to explore and visualize large quantities of protein PBD data using Jupyter notebooks and the Python programming language. This activity instructs participants using Jupyter notebooks, Python…

A glass of water covered with a disk with a hole in it can be turned upside down without spilling the water in the glass, provided the hole is small enough and the disk is pressed against the rim of the glass. A quasistatic numerical simulation based on hydrostatic pressure and surface tension of water was used calculate the critical hole diameter…

This work covers a three-week program designed to provide undergraduate students with a background in structural chemistry and materials science. Sessions are based on the programming of regular polyhedra and their geometrical relationships by using an object-oriented language (i.e., POV-Ray). Three lectures introduce the basics of programming…

The use of three-dimensional printing in chemistry education has expanded greatly in the past 10 years. The technique has been used to demonstrate a range of concepts including molecular structure, orbitals, and point groups; to produce chemical equipment such as cuvettes and columns; and even to print out mathematical shapes and functions. Here,…