Programming Life

Welcome to Programming Life! Here you can learn about a wide range of biology by building projects in Scratch. Some projects are tutorials that help walk you through the material. Others are just the projects, which you can explore or extend on your own. Don't know where to get started? We recommend Programming Cells.

Tutorials

Programming Cells

https://sites.google.com/view/programming-cells

Age: 5th grade and up; Duration: 1-2 hours

Learn to program by teaching a cell to crawl and eat bacteria.

Go Viral

https://sites.google.com/virginia.edu/goviral

Age: 9th grade and up Duration: 2 hours or more

Explore simulations of how a virus spreads throughout a population. Extend the code to test out strategies for limiting the epidemic.

Projects

Evolution of cats

https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/605559893/

Test how mutation and selection work together to drive the evolution of a herd of cats.

Diabetes simulator

https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/600741108/

Learn how insulin and glucose work together after a meal, and how diabetes disrupts this process. Learan how type 1 and type 2 diabetes differ.

Chagas simulator

https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/300737905/

Learn how the parasite T. cruzi infects heart muscle cells, which leads to Chagas disease.

Fitzhugh-Nagumo model of the action potential

https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/238008659/

Solves the differential equations corresponding to the Fitzhugh-Nagumo model of cardiac action potentials.

Lorenz system

https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/237859223/

Not biological, but my favorite equations! Solves the differential equations corresponding to the Lorenz model, an example of a chaotic system. The Lorenz equations were developed as a model of the atmosphere.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorenz_system

About

The projects described in Programming Life were developed at the University of Virginia. If If you have feedback on these projects, have project requests, or would like teaching materials, please email Dr. Saucerman at jsaucerman<at>virginia.edu. We'd love to further engage with teachers!

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