Jupyter Notebooks as Computational Thinking Tools for Teaching and Lifelong Learning in Biotechnology
R. Lebrón, A. Ortiz-Atienza, S. Bretones, C. Capel, Fernando Juan Yuste-Lisbona, A. Cámara-Artigas · Atlantis highlights in social sciences, education and humanities/Atlantis Highlights in Social Sciences, Education and Humanities · 2023
To remain operational during the COVID-19 pandemic, educational institutions had to rapidly migrate to online learning, affecting 1.6 billion students worldwide.This unexpected scenario required extra effort for teachers and students, but it also provided an opportunity to encourage students to develop new skills, such as computational thinking, and to foster lifelong and autonomous learning.Computational thinking is not only one of the cornerstones of programming, but scientists from all disciplines use it to solve problems even when they are not programming.Literate programming is a paradigm that facilitates the acquisition of these skills by combining explanatory texts in natural language with executable code snippets and their output to familiarize a broad public with how code works and the reasoning behind it.These tools are known as interactive notebooks, with the Jupyter Notebook platform standing out for its simplicity, support for multiple programming languages, and ability to be used online.In this paper, we share our experience with Jupyter notebooks for teaching biotechnology, highlighting the pedagogical patterns we have found most useful to foster computational thinking among students with no prior programming background and providing tips to help extend the use of these tools in teaching. Research Contribution:In fast-paced, ever-changing research and industries, the ability to face new challenges is essential.To assist biotechnology students in becoming problem solvers and critical thinkers, we propose an approach based on the development of computational thinking skills using interactive notebooks as training materials.