Abstract: Agent-based modeling (ABM) has become an increasingly important tool in computational science. Thus, in the final week of the in 2013 fall semester, Wofford College's undergraduate Modeling and Simulation for the Sciences course (COSC/MATH 201) considered ABM using the NetLogo tool. The students explored existing ABMs and completed two tutorials that developed models on unconstrained growth and the average distance covered by a random walker. The models demonstrated some of the utility of ABM and helped illustrate the similarities and differences between agent-based modeling and previously discussed techniques—system dynamics modeling, empirical modeling, and cellular automaton simulations. Improved test scores and questionnaire results support the success of the goals for the week.

Abstract: Molecular biology is a scientific discipline which has changed fundamentally in character over the past decade to rely on large scale datasets – public and locally generated - and their computational analysis and annotation. Undergraduate education of biologists must increasingly couple this domain context with a data-driven computational scientific method. Yet modern programming and scripting languages and rich computational environments such as R and matlab present significant barriers to those with limited exposure to computer science, and may require substantial tutorial assistance over an extended period if progress is to be made. In this paper we report our experience of undergraduate bioinformatics education using the familiar, ubiquitous spreadsheet environment of Microsoft Excel. We describe a configurable extension called QUT.Bio.Excel, a custom ribbon, supporting a rich set data sources, external tools and interactive processing within the spreadsheet, and a range of problems to demonstrate its utility and success in addressing the needs of students over their studies.

Abstract: This paper describes a 3D virtual lab environment that was developed using OpenSim software integrated into Moodle. Virtuald software tool was used to provide pedagogical support to the lab by enabling to create online texts and delivering them to the students. The courses taught in this virtual lab are methodologically in conformity to theory of multiple intelligences. Some results are presented

Abstract: We describe a simple package of Matlab programs which implements an extended-precision class in Matlab. We give some examples of how this class can be used to demonstrate the effects of rounding errors and truncation errors in scientific computing. The package is based on a representation called Double-Double, which represents each floating-point real as an unevaluated sum of IEEE double-precision floating point numbers. This allows Matlab computations that are accurate to 30 decimal digits. The data structure, basic arithmetic and elementary functions are implemented as a Matlab class, entirely using the Matlab programming language.