The field of bioinformatics is at once developed enough that introductory courses are popular among undergraduates, and new enough that there is not yet a “traditional” introductory curriculum. While this presents some challenges for instructors, it also offers tremendous leeway for assembling sets of resources tuned to the needs of specific cohorts of students. To be effective, courses must help develop specific skills in coding and data visualization while fostering broader work habits of independence and collaboration. By focusing on core concepts and challenging students to apply them to real-world examples, instructors can model in the classroom the sorts of collaborative, multidisciplinary settings students will encounter in their future academic and research work.