Topic:
Data Science and Data Life Cycle

Course:
MATH 152: Math for the Life Sciences II

Abstract:
With the advent of “big data” and large online data repositories, current science students will, at some point in their academic career, need to understand the methods used to explore data sets, find reliable data repositories, and understand how to conduct basic analyses. Currently, there is no undergraduate level course providing an introduction to such skills, collectively called data science. A candidate class to introduce data science is Mathematics for the Life Sciences II. Math for the Life Sciences I and II (Math 151 and 152 respectively) are designed to provide students with introductory mathematical and computational skills needed to be proficient scientists with the second course advancing the skills acquired in the first. Part of the reason students take Math 152 is to obtain the computational skills needed to explore biological phenomena. Consequently, this course could introduce a project encouraging students to explore data science without extending the scope of the class whilst at the same time providing students with additional computation skills they are most likely to use.