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

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.