During the 2020 summer professional development course held July 6, 2020 – July 31, 2020, the University of Pennsylvania collaborated with teachers from the School District of Philadelphia to bring current science research into local high schools through a problem-based learning curriculum in bioinformatics. In preparation for the 2020 workshop, we joined forces with the participant teachers from 2019, who continued to work with us throughout the academic year as design collaborators, in order to improve the experience for the incoming participants. We shifted the mode of delivery of the course from face-to-face to the edX online platform (edx.org) due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In this online course, entitled Building Bioinformatics and Data Literacy for High School Biology and Environmental Science Teachers and Students, teachers learned how to engage students with scientific issues in their community through the use of mobile apps and data analysis tools. Publicly available course videos are available in the K-12Bioinformatics YouTube channel. During the 2020-2021 school year, each teacher will work closely with researchers from Penn’s Graduate School of Education and biomedical informaticists from Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine to adapt and implement a problem-based learning unit for their classroom. Based on their research findings, students will develop solutions to improve the air quality in their local environment. The overarching goal of the course is to help create informatics-informed students, who are capable of critically analyzing information and able to solve local problems related to their health and well-being.

2019 Summer Institute for Teacher Professional Development

During the Summer Institute held July 8, 2019 – July 26, 2019, the University of Pennsylvania collaborated with teachers from the School District of Philadelphia to bring current science research into the secondary classroom through a problem-based learning curriculum in bioinformatics. During this professional development course, teachers learned how to support students to engage with real-world environmental datasets using the latest scientific techniques to collect and analyze biological and environmental data. Teachers also learned to build and integrate mobile technologies into classroom activities. Each teacher worked with a team of researchers from Penn’s Graduate School of Education and bioinformaticists from Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine to design a problem-based learning unit for classroom implementation during the 2019-2020 school year. During the classroom implementation, students will use mobile tools to collect health-related data in their neighborhood for comparison to national datasets. Students will ultimately develop solutions to improve their local environment.

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