SBIR Phase II: Use of a Visual Programming Environment to Promote Bioinformatics Education

这个小企业创新研究（SBIR）第二阶段项目旨在提供一个工具，以改善生物信息学教育。 这个工具，VIBE-Ed，是一个软件产品，旨在通过创建一个互动的，集成的，全面的方法来使用可视化编程的生物信息学教育，以增强在学院和大学一级的生物信息学。 在第一阶段项目期间，INCOGEN表明，其现有的研究工具VIBE由于其固有的技术属性，为教育工具提供了良好的基础。 VIBE采用可视化编程的生物信息学，在这方面，VIBE-Ed将提供一种新的方法来生物信息学课堂教学。 第一阶段的工作证明了视觉编程在学习过程中的有效性。 除了可视化编程之外，VIBE的架构还支持包含有关其中包含的生物信息学工具的广泛信息，使得VIBE-Ed非常适合托管教育工具所需的大量复杂的资源和文档。 随着生物信息学社区发现和验证新的分析工具，这些工具可以很容易地被整合到VIBE-Ed中，沿着支持它们的教育功能。生物信息学教育是一个不断发展的领域，这是由生物学和生物医学研究领域对训练有素的生物信息学家的巨大需求推动的。 近年来，世界各地的学院和大学开设的生物信息学课程和学位课程数量显著增加。 教科书和讲座本身并没有让生物信息学学生接触到实际的数据分析，而且它们本身也不足以进行生物信息学教育。 尽管生物信息学教育的趋势日益增长，需要以教育为重点的工具，但仍然严重缺乏专门为生物信息学教育设计的商业软件工具。 目前，生物信息学教师通过使用复杂和昂贵的研究工具或基于网络的工具集来填补这一空白。 生物信息学研究软件对于教育应用来说通常成本过高，并且软件本身面向该领域的专家而不是学生。 基于网络的工具通常是免费的，但它们也经常分散在整个网络上，需要过多的时间，有时还需要编程技能来结合使用几个工具联合收割机。 许多工具没有附带说明或相关的概念信息，因此不太适合教育。 VIBE-Ed成功地解决了这些问题，并有望对生物信息学教育产生直接影响，并最终对生命科学研究的知识发现产生影响。

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project seeks to provide a tool to improve bioinformatics education. This tool, VIBE-Ed, is a software product designed to augment bioinformatics at the college and university level by creating an interactive, integrated, and comprehensive approach to bioinformatics education using visual programming. During the Phase I project, INCOGEN demonstrated that its existing research tool, VIBE, provides an excellent foundation for an educational tool given its inherent technological attributes. VIBE employs visual programming for bioinformatics, and in this respect, VIBE-Ed will provide a novel approach to bioinformatics classroom instruction. The Phase I work demonstrated the effectiveness of visual programming in the learning process. In addition to visual programming, the architecture of VIBE supports the inclusion of extensive information about the bioinformatics tools contained therein, making VIBE-Ed well suited to host the large and complex amount of resources and documentation required by an educational tool. Finally, VIBE was created to be extensible, allowing it to be naturally extended into VIBE-Ed. As the bioinformatics community discovers and validates new analysis tools, these can easily be incorporated into VIBE-Ed, along with the educational features to support them.Bioinformatics education is a growing field, driven by the great need for trained bioinformaticists in biological and biomedical research. Recent years have witnessed notable increases in the number of bioinformatics courses and degree programs at colleges and universities worldwide. Textbooks and lectures alone do not expose bioinformatics students to hands-on data analysis and, by themselves, they are insufficient for bioinformatics education. Despite the growing trend in bioinformatics education and the need for educationally focused tools, there is a significant lack of commercially available software tools specifically designed for bioinformatics education. Currently, bioinformatics instructors fill this gap by using either complicated and expensive research tools or collections of web-based tools. Bioinformatics research software is often cost prohibitive for an educational application, and the software itself is geared toward experts in the field rather than toward students. Web-based tools are often free of charge, but they are also frequently dispersed throughout the web, requiring excessive time and sometimes also requiring programming skill to combine the use of several tools. Many of the tools are not accompanied by instruction or related conceptual information, making them less suitable for education. VIBE-Ed successfully addresses these concerns and promises to have immediate impact on bioinformatics education and, ultimately, in knowledge discovery on life science research.