Hybrid Simulation of a Scientific Conference: Inquiry-Based Learning to Enable Master's Degree Students to Acquire Research Skills

A novel course concept to enable master's degree students to acquire research skills is described as an experience report. A hybrid, inquiry-based format was developed to simulate each phase of writing and presenting a research paper at a scientific conference. Students self-organized into groups to conduct each phase of the research process to conduct a research project for a scientific topic, bionic computation. Weekly group meetings with the instructor were conducted via video conference. Students learned to formulate research questions, write abstracts, acquire experimental data and evaluate open-source libraries and tools to build their own experimental models. An in-house, mini-conference was held in person, in which each group held a presentation of their work. At the end of the semester, a retrospective was held to reflect on students' experiences and summarize the lessons they have learned. After the course, slight majority of the students stated that they could imagine writing a paper about their master's theses and taking part in a real conference. [For the full proceedings, see ED636095.]