# Bioinformatics — steal this assignment
_EL3vate 2026 · Day 8 · Part 09 of 15 · build 3dfcaff_

## Try it Tuesday (90 minutes)
90 minutes. Minutes 0–15: each student writes, in one sentence a non-scientist could follow, the biological question behind a variant or structure they choose. Minutes 15–50: they run the explain-to-a-layperson prompt and generate an interactive explainer, then use the embedded variant-explainer demo to check whether a toggled change is described correctly. Minutes 50–90: a cross-disciplinary read — a student from another field reads the explainer and marks every term left undefined and every claim stated without a source. The deliverable is the explainer plus the outside reader's marked-up copy; it grades whether the student actually understands the pipeline they ran.

## The assignment
**Make it (3D print).** A printed structure from a record the student selected and defended: a binding site, a mutation, a fold. Print two variants, wild type and mutant, and let the difference be something you can feel rather than something you are told.

**Build it (AI chat · no code).** An interactive explainer of the student’s own analysis, written for a non-specialist. Explaining a pipeline to a general audience exposes whether the student understands it, which a working script does not.

## 4-week plan
- **Wk 1.** Each student picks a structure or dataset and writes the biological question in one sentence a non-scientist would understand, and identifies the wild-type and mutant structures to print.
- **Wk 2.** Submit the print file (wild-type and mutant) at the start of the week so fabrication runs in parallel, then run the analysis.
- **Wk 3.** Build the public-facing interactive explainer. Peer review is done by a student from a different discipline who has to say what they did not follow.
- **Wk 4.** Present both. Assessment weight sits on whether the non-specialist reviewer understood the finding.

## What this replaces
- **Replaces:** The computational lab report or annotated pipeline script.
- **What is lost:** The detailed methods documentation and reproducible code write-up.
- **What is gained:** Explaining the analysis to a non-specialist exposes whether the student understands it — something a working script can hide — and the outside reader's confusion is a sharper diagnostic than a methods section a peer skims.

## Where AI is bad at this
A model states gene and variant function with unwarranted confidence and no source — asserting that a variant 'causes' a phenotype, inventing a mechanism, or collapsing a defect class into a single switch, in authoritative clinical language it cannot back. It also silently mishandles the biology, conflating a deletion with a point mutation or ignoring that two gene copies matter, and its fluency makes the error invisible to a non-specialist.

## Rubric
| Criterion | Weight | What it assesses |
|---|---|---|
| Scientific accuracy | 30% | The explainer's claims about the variant and its consequence are correct and would survive a specialist's read. |
| Lay comprehensibility | 30% | An outside reader understands the finding; every term is defined on first use and no acronym is left unspelled. |
| Acknowledged simplification | 25% | The student names where they simplified in a way a specialist would object to, rather than hiding it. |
| Source discipline | 15% | Claims are attributed or flagged as uncertain instead of asserted with false confidence. |

## Starter prompt
> Build a single self-contained HTML page that explains this analysis to someone with no biology background: [describe the analysis and the finding]. Use an interactive element so the reader can change one input and see the result change. Explain every term the first time it appears. Do not use an acronym without spelling it out. Then tell me the three places where you had to simplify in a way that a specialist would object to.

## Budget & logistics
- **Instructor prep:** 2 hours
- **Class time:** 90 minutes
- **Per-student cost:** $0 for the Tuesday version; roughly $6–12 per student in filament **[unverified]** for wild-type and mutant structure prints in the four-week build.
- **Fabrication file due:** First day of Week 2 — submit the print file (wild-type and mutant) at the start of the week. PACE quotes 7–10 business days (up to 14 calendar days), so it clears before the week-4 presentation.
- **Calendar dependency:** Analysis and explainer need no lead time. The structures are selected in week 1, so the print file goes in at the start of week 2 and the up-to-14-calendar-day turnaround clears before the week-4 presentation.

## Three sizes
- **One session:** The 90-minute explainer-plus-outside-read session; no fabrication.
- **4 weeks:** The seeded four-week plan: pick a structure and question, run the analysis and submit print files, build and peer-review the explainer, then present both.
- **One semester:** A full project — a self-selected dataset, a reproducible analysis, printed wild-type and mutant structures, and a public-facing explainer peer-reviewed for comprehension by non-scientists.

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_PACE · Shidler College of Business · University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa · pace.shidler.hawaii.edu/maker_
_All fifteen assignments, the demos and every handout: https://el3vate.vercel.app_