WEBSITE DEVELOPMENT
Website development & Co-Founder: Paula Balcells (BSc in Bioinformatics – ESCI Universidad Pompeu Fabra; Master’s student in Cognitive Systems and Interactive Media – Universidad Pompeu Fabra, Spain)
Code for a Change is an online interactive platform created during COVID-19 outbreak that aims to encourage people to develop programming skills. This community offers free coding lessons in the programming language Python, a coding challenge for beginners, and the opportunity to contribute to a charitable cause.
Put your Python coding skills into practice with beginner-friendly challenges based on bioinformatics problems that, on a larger scale, computational scientists have to deal with in their daily research. Bioinformatics is a field that tackles biological questions using computational methods and software tools. It combines biology, computer science, maths and statistics to analyse and interpret large and complex data.
Run our samples and write your own code snippets with trinket, an online all-in-one coding environment. Solve our challenges and practice with the interactive exercises in any browser, on any device.
Run our samples and write your own code snippets with trinket, an online all-in-one coding environment. Solve our challenges and practice with the interactive exercises in any browser, on any device.
Ready for the challenge? Practice your Python skills in our first edition of #HackTheVirus Challenge. There are a total of three tasks to solve, which are meant to be challenging for coding beginners. Each question has hints and example solutions, which also work on your phone for you to code on the go.
Just getting started? Try solving our lessons for beginners first.
Mariana Quiroga Londoño (she/her) is a Bioinformatician, MPhil in Medical Science graduate, research assistant and second-year PhD student in Haematology at the University of Cambridge. She’s also Vice-Chair of the Cambridge Stem Cell Institute PhD committee. In her free time, she’s an education advocate, science communicator @marianaql.science and innovator.
Website development & Co-Founder: Paula Balcells (BSc in Bioinformatics – ESCI Universidad Pompeu Fabra; Master’s student in Cognitive Systems and Interactive Media – Universidad Pompeu Fabra, Spain)
Instagram, “Biotech” content:
“Science is not a boy’s game, it’s not a girl’s game. It’s everyone’s game. It’s about where we are and where we’re going. Space travel benefits us here on Earth. And we ain’t stopped yet. There’s more exploration to come.”
“People ask me all the time: ‘What is it like to be a woman at Google?’ I’m not a woman at Google, I’m a geek at Google. And being a geek is just great. I’m a geek, I like to code, I even like to use spreadsheets when I cook.”
“If you know you are on the right track, if you have this inner knowledge, then nobody can turn you off… no matter what they say.”
“Certain people discouraged me, saying science was not a good career for women. That pushed me even more to persevere.”
“Science, for me, gives a partial explanation for life. In so far as it goes, it is based on fact, experience and experiment.”
“Let us choose for ourselves our path in life, and let us try to strew that path with flowers.”
“Don’t let anyone rob you of your imagination, your creativity, or your curiosity. It’s your place in the world; it’s your life. Go on and do all you can with it, and make it the life you want to live.”
“I was taught that the way of progress was neither swift nor easy.”
“Life need not be easy, provided only that it is not empty.”
“All sorts of things can happen when you’re open to new ideas and playing around with things.”
“As always in life, people want a simple answer . . . and it’s always wrong.”
“Courage is like — it’s a habitus, a habit, a virtue: you get it by courageous acts. It’s like you learn to swim by swimming. You learn courage by couraging.”
“For a research worker the unforgotten moments of his life are those rare ones which come after years of plodding work, when the veil over natures secret seems suddenly to lift & when what was dark & chaotic appears in a clear & beautiful light & pattern.”
“I didn’t want to just know names of things. I remember really wanting to know how it all worked.”