Achievement

SCALE-IT has created a three-course series to empower trainees to become proficient programmers and be functional with high-performance computing resources. The first course is a lab addendum to an existing bioinformatics course that teaches scripting competency and basic computing. It is intended to ease transition for those that have no computer background into “Intro Programming for Scientists and Engineers,” a course that teaches coding and computer architecture. This in turn leads to a summer course entitled “Fundamentals in Computing Science,” which provides a larger picture of the discipline and enables students to succeed comfortably in graduate level computer science courses. We now have the core curriculum in place to achieve the goal of creating computationally interdisciplinary biologists. This series serves as the model for achieving the reciprocal training and has led to a proposal for a capstone course that integrates both types of students.