The project has two main goals: 1) The first goal is to develop interactive simulations and the corresponding visualizations that support interactive exercises that will develop students' quantitative intuition about selected quantitative phenomena taught in the 3rd semester Bioanalytics course. 2) The second goal is to acquire, at the DBIOL’s Center for Active Learning (CAL), the competence to develop such simulations / visualizations in the framework of the LET-supported JupyterHub platform. This competence will allow us to develop, at short notice, similar simulations, visualizations and exercises as teaching tools for other departmental courses.

Students will have access to a new category of learning material that synergizes with the existing lecture- and text-based material. In particular the new learning material will allow students to explore quantitative and dynamic phenomena that may be difficult to grasp based on the existing training materials (linear narratives and static images). The ability to directly interact with the simulation’s code and data will allow students to apply and consolidate the computational skills they are acquiring in their introductory informatics course. This transfer will be facilitated by the fact that the simulations will use the same programming language and similar development environments as the introductory informatics course. The students will develop the habit of using computational approaches to think about and explore new areas of their study outside of their informatics courses. Lecturers will have a newl class of teaching material at their disposal, which is particularly useful for the type of phenomena and effects they have to convey to the students in this course. At the level of the Biology Bachelor degree program, the increase of computational competencies, in particular the ability to explore problems or phenomena computationally, is a long-term goal that is well aligned with the ETH computational competency initiative. Establishing the expertise for the development of simulations and computation-based exercises on the ETH-preferred computation platform (iPython / Jupyter Hub) to the DBIOL’s Center for Active Learning (CAL) will facilitate the development and routine use of this type of simulation / exercise throughout the DBIOL curriculum. In the past the CAL has already catalyzed the widespread adoption of other modern teaching tools in the department. Examples include the use of Moodle pages, blended / flipped-classroom course formats and electronic exams.