Introducing Python Programming into Undergraduate Biology

Abstract

The rise of “big data” within the biological sciences has resulted in an urgent demand for coding skills in the next generation of scientists. To address this issue, several institutions and departments across the country have incorporated coding into their curricula. I describe a coding module developed and deployed in an undergraduate parasitology course, with the overarching goal of familiarizing students with the Python programming language. The module, which was completed over four days, aimed to help students become comfortable with the command line; execute summary statistics and Student’s t-tests through coding; create simple bar and line graphs using code; and, parse, handle, and analyze imported data sets. There is currently no standard “best practice” for teaching coding skills to biology majors, but this module can serve as a template to ease students into coding, and can then be modified and built out for teaching more advanced skills.