Teaching big data to future scientists means having them think creatively about ways to harness the terabytes of information available to them. To that end, systems biologist Trey Ideker used his UC San Diego School of Medicine’s Biological Networks and Biomedicine graduate course to host a classroom competition tasking students with detecting genes associated with schizophrenia. The winning technique was quick, flexible, and outperformed previously published methods. The details appear April 24 in the journal Cell Systems.