Can the use of Google Colab improve female and male mathematical analytical thinking in biomedical engineering students?

Google Colab is a free product from Google Research, which allows programming in Python from a browser, and is primarily suitable for (1) machine learning, (2) data analysis, and (3) education. Google Colab is an online programming environment that requires no installation. It has basic math (Math), deep learning (TensorFlow), machine learning (Scikit-learn) and graphing (Matplotlib) tools. Like other Google online tools, it has collaborative properties that allow parallel programming by different users, whose work environments are stored in Google Drive. In addition, it is possible to document the codes with multimedia material, and to publish and import from GitHub.

Therefore, this project aims to use Google Colab as an assistance teaching tool that takes into account the interests and competencies of male and female biomedical engineering students to improve their experience and academic performance. The project proposes to use Google Colab in three ways: (1) implementing study cases in the health area with illustrative materials (e.g., images, sounds, web pages), (2) continuous monitoring by the teacher, and (3) asynchronous collaborative programming. For this purpose, a teacher's guide and a repository of example activities will be implemented in accordance with student feedback.

The project seeks to develop mathematical analytical thinking to quantitatively interpret measurements of biological systems. On the one hand, male students are expected to increase their interest in mathematical analysis through computational development (characteristic more preferred by men). On the other hand, female students are expected to have online mathematical counseling and study cases in the health area (characteristics more preferred by women).

The overall goal is to change the dynamics of teaching applied mathematics, which is an important factor of withdraw, mainly of women in engineering. Men and women have different interests and competencies in engineering, and the frequent ignoring of this fact in the teaching process could be a factor in the current gender gap in STEM (Science, Tech, Engineering and Math).

This proposal is scalable because Google Colab is a free, friendly and executable programming environment in the cloud. It does not involve economic, administrative or infrastructural costs. It is also transferable not only for other blocks and subjects of biomedical engineering, but also for any other engineering, where programming tools are indispensable. Google Colab is a simple and easy to learn environment.