Many 1 years ago, over three summers, I implemented prototypes that were transformed into 2nd year projects for Life Science students at EPFL, in Jamila Sam’s course Projets en Informatique pour SV.
Each project combined the simulation of a physical phenomenon with a visualization (OpenGL and wxWidgets), in C++.
The students’ experience was for most limited to a one-semester C++ course, and the goal of this class was to practice hands-on programming and software engineering on a project of non-trivial scale.
The prototypes were skilfully deconstructed by Jamila Sam into a series of steps that guided the students into designing and implementing the projects, but gave enough freedom that a lot of variance (for the better or worse) could be observed during grading.
13 at the time of updating that note.
2011: Simulation and visualization of the Electron Transport Chain
![](https://c.pgdm.ch/notes/projects-students-lifesciences/2011.png)
2012: Simulation of bacteria in Petri dishes, with random mutations
![](https://c.pgdm.ch/notes/projects-students-lifesciences/2012.png)
2013: Simulation of bee colonies, with random terrain generation
![](https://c.pgdm.ch/notes/projects-students-lifesciences/2013.png)
![](https://c.pgdm.ch/notes/projects-students-lifesciences/2013-1.png)