The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
Bioinformatics is now an integral part of biology and biological research. The field began with a few people from other disciplines teaching themselves and each other the techniques that are now considered commonplace. These pioneers then began graduate programs
We now introduce a subsection of the Education section with articles devoted to teaching bioinformatics in secondary schools that is derived from the work of the Education committee of the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB), who identified a need to address the issue of incorporating bioinformatics into secondary school biology classes. They also recognized the interest among researchers to build and participate in outreach programs at the secondary school level given that many funding agencies worldwide encourage such a component in grant applications.
To move the ball forward on secondary school bioinformatics education, at ISCB's 2010 international conference, Intelligent Systems in Molecular Biology (ISMB), the ISCB Education committee organized a half-day tutorial aimed at secondary school biology and chemistry teachers in the Boston area interested in learning about bioinformatics and how to include it in their curricula. The tutorial also attracted researchers involved in organizing or formulating outreach programs in their community. The main focus of the ISMB tutorial was the presentation of lesson plans by a secondary school teacher (David Form, a biology teacher at Nashoba Regional High School, Bolton, Massachusetts) who has successfully incorporated bioinformatics into his courses for more than five years. His is one example of such an effort and is embraced in the Ten Simple Rules and its supplementary material found in this issue. Also in this issue we have an article by Suzanne Gallagher and colleagues on the experience of teaching secondary school level bioinformatics in Boulder, Colorado.
There are many examples of outreach efforts to high school students that we would like to feature in coming months, which incorporate bioinformatics into their programs (see
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There are many other examples of educators doing similar work in school districts worldwide. A recent issue of
We encourage feedback of any form, including comments on this editorial, and hearing about your experience teaching bioinformatics to secondary school students.