If you aren’t familiar, Donors Choose is like the Kickstarter for classrooms. Teachers who are hunting for funding to buy classroom supplies, tech, and tools can turn to their communities for support when the school’s budget can’t support them.
This is an awesome opportunity for teachers to bring awareness to issues of classroom funding, to connect their classroom with their communities, and to afford new educational resources to give their students what they deserve! It is also a platform where large corporations and charities turn to find opportunities to support the future leaders of their industries.
Many of the teachers we work with hunt for grants and alternative funding strategies to supplement and enrich their curriculum with the inclusion of our hands-on neuroscience kits. And some, as you will see below in the below example, have found success funding their classrooms on Donors Choose!
Funded: California AVID Classroom
Mr. Gomez set out to enrich his AVID leadership students’ Science classroom with some hands-on biotech earlier this year. He set up his campaign to fund the purchase of a Backyard Brains Toolbox for his classroom, and his words really speak best to the effort:
My Students
Our students are inner city, at-risk students living in between East Hollywood and downtown Los Angeles, a city filled with dreams and filled with life’s harsh reality. Their school and city are contradictions of the truth. It is a location where the imaginary high school show “GLEE” is filmed, but the reality of high school for them is parents that work nights, single-parent households, teen pregnancy and other issues of inner-city youth.
My Project
This is a fun, affordable, hands-on way to experiment with neuroscience. A toolbox full of different types of tools to learn how the brain works. During science class, we never really get to show students the fun side of science because we lack the money to buy fancy equipment. |
|
| Then, a few weeks later, after the project had received partial funding, Mr. Gomez’s project got included in the incredibly generous charitable effort by Ripple, developers of a cryptocurrency, who funded every single project on Donor’s Choose. |
|
OMG!! thank you thank you thank you!!! this is such great news. You have changed so many lives with this donation. I am really lost for words. It is truly the best day of the year. My students and I will be forever thankful and I am usually good at writing thank you letters but I truly am lost for words.
With gratitude,
Teacher Gomez
| Thank you so much for everything you have given my students and I. We will now be able to explore the brain and the science that lies deep within it. Making learning fun is key when one is trying to engagement of a student mind. My student will love this new project, they really wanted to use it when I should them videos of what was coming. We will use these lesson to start exploring how our minds work both physically and sociologically. Which will guide us throw the tunnel of exploring what depression is, how drugs affect our brain and how to have a healthy mind, mindfulness.
With gratitude,
Teacher Gomez |
|
| We are excited to see what Mr. Gomez and his students achieve! He began this school year by introducing his 9th grade students to the resources and, as they learn to use the kits and learn about the neuroscience behind the experiments, they plan to expand the application to other classes soon. |
|
This toolbox contains most all of our core products in one portable box. A Neuron SpikerBox, a Muscle SpikerBox, a Human-Human-Interface, a Manipulator, a RoachScope, a Metal Platform with magnet snaps to keep things tidy, a RoboRoach, and our new Heart and Brain SpikerBox. This ships with 100 Patch Electrodes and all the cables you need. Now do some outreach, make some discoveries, and share your results!
Engage your students with even more Real-World Science
PLTW is a powerhouse in the STEM Ed movement. Thanks to them, many schools are offering courses in Engineering, Computer Science, and, most exciting to us at BYB, Biomedical Sciences. Thanks to these courses, students have the opportunity to learn about all sorts of incredible career and research fields (Including Biomedical Engineering and Neuroscience!), and the courses are led by inquiry and hands-on activities.
We work with many PLTW teachers who have incorporated Backyard Brains tools and experiments to help enrich their courses and to provide exciting, hands-on labs and materials for some of the trickier to cover concepts. Below I have just a few examples of how to incorporate new and novel labs and demonstrations into your PLTW course to empower and inspire your students.
If you teach a PLTW course, this will be a great resource for you as you seek ways to further engage your students and give them real-world, hands-on experiences. If you don’t teach a PLTW course, well, as they say, steal everything that isn’t nailed down or protected by licensing (none of our materials are!) and use it to improve your own classes!
Medical Interventions
Unit 3: How to Conquer Cancer
Lesson 3.3: Treating Cancer
In brief, here are a few of the performance objectives for this lesson
- Design and create a simple model of an arm that is able to pick up an empty Styrofoam cup.
- Complete a laboratory investigation using data acquisition software and probes to explore biofeedback therapy.
- Design an experiment to test the effect of relaxation techniques on their heart rate, respiration rate, and skin temperature.
- Design and present a comprehensive rehabilitation plan for an assigned patient.
Prosthetics and assistive technologies are really exciting examples of applied sciences. It shows students how they can combine an interest in the life sciences with computer science and engineering. We’ve had many PLTW use Backyard Brains’ The Claw during this lesson to give students a hands-on experiment with a real neuroprosthetic. By recording from the muscles in their arms (or anywhere in their body), students can dynamically control the claw.
Then, you can have students design their own neuroprosthetic which they can actually control with their nervous system…
Biofeedback is an umbrella which includes neuroprosthetics, but within these objectives, it is being investigated as a therapeutic system. Learning to control or affect certain functions of your body can be hard. Learning to REGAIN control following injury or illness can be even more challenging. The goal of Biofeedback systems is that they provide an external indicator of how the subject is progressing. This includes everything from regaining control of movement in your body, to simply staying calm, managing your heart rate, or meditating with an EEG device!
Check out these Backyard Brains experiments which use the Heart and Brain SpikerBox to explore some of these signals, then your student can design a biofeedback experiment observing EEG, EKG, or even EOG (Eye Potentials).
Experiment: Record and Decode your Heart Rate
Experiment: Observe your Sympathetic Nervous System in Action
Experiment: Record Alpha Waves from your Brain
Experiment: Eye Potentials? What are those?
Human Body Systems
Unit 2: Communication
Lesson 2: Electrical Communication
Sounds like electrophysiology to me! In brief, here are a few of the performance objectives for this lesson
- Use an interactive website to manipulate ions in a membrane and generate an action potential in a neuron.
- Complete a laboratory investigation using data acquisition software and probes to explore reflexes in the human body.
- Design an experiment to test factors that could impact reaction time.
A question with an obvious answer: would you rather your students learn about neurons by making a pipe-cleaner 3D model and clicking through a web-app? Or do you want them to record living neurons from a model organism, turning the introduction of neuroscience into a hands-on, quantitative lab? Much like the NGSS MS-LS1-8, this is an opportunity to introduce students of any age to Neuroscience by performing one of the most fundamental experiments in neuroscience: recording directly from a neuron!
https://twitter.com/orieshafer/status/1009517141354311680
Using the Neuron SpikerBox, students can first observe live Action Potentials, then learn about how these signals are interpreted – a process called Rate Coding.
Experiment: Record from a Living Neuron
Experiment: Learn how Action Potentials Encode Information
But what about Humans? We believe that using cockroaches and other model organisms to introduce neurons and Action Potentials is an incredibly important and powerful learning experience. But we’re not about to ignore the human element…
When we show students the Human-Human-Interface (seen in the above TED talk), it never fails to amaze and surprise them. It is also an incredibly effective way to illustrate the role that electrical systems play in sending and receiving signals throughout the human body. One PLTW teacher we work with said she usually tries to invite the principal in to be the subject of the experiment, making it especially fun for the students when they get to take control!
Experiment: Take Someone’s Free Will
Reflexes
In this lesson, there is also an emphasis on understanding reflexes and reaction time – rightfully so! Mental Chronometry is the foundation of modern neuroscience. Before we studied Neurons, we studied reaction times to externally investigate the nervous system. Could you react faster to a sound, a light, or a touch? Differences in these reaction times and, consequently, differences in reflexes, informed an early understanding of neural circuitry, and you too can perform these experiments!
Check out these experiments below which students can get started with before hacking them to create their own projects!
Experiment: How Fast Can Your Body React?
Experiment: The Patellar Reflex and Reaction
Unit 4: Movement
Lesson 2: Muscles & Lesson 4: Exercise Physiology
Here are a few of the performance objectives for these lessons
- Investigate Muscular Anatomy and learn about the link between Muscles, Neurons, and your Brain
- Learn how muscles are composed of units called sarcomeres, which contract and shorten when exposed to electrical stimuli.
- Complete a laboratory investigation using data acquisition software and probes to explore muscle fatigue.
- Design an experiment to test the effect of feedback, coaching or competition on muscle fatigue.
These lessons are a great way to bridge the gaps between many different interests. Athletes in your class are going to be excited to learn about exercise physiology, your bio students are going to love to learn about motor-units and muscular anatomy, and all the students love a little bit of competition and hands-on experiments…
Muscles
Beginning with the mechanisms which excite your muscles and which we can record data from, students learn about and record EMG signals from their own muscles using the Muscle SpikerBox Pro. This allows your students to hear, see, and record the electrical activity of their muscles, ultimately facilitating a number of exciting (and competitive) labs.
https://twitter.com/FarkasSTEM/status/999644823878545408
But first, your students can explore muscular anatomy and learn about Agonist and Antagonist muscle pairs, and then take a deeper dive to record from Motor Units.
Experiment: Agonist and Antagonist Muscle Groups
Experiment: Hunting for Motor Units
Exercise Physiology
Muscle Fatigue is the next phenomena to investigate, and here’s where things can get competitive (or, if you prefer, comparative!)Students can design their own muscle fatigue experiment or comparative inquiry. By quantifying the strength of the beginning and end of an EMG signal, students can create a Rate of Fatigue over time which they can then compare between each other, or themselves as they continue to exercise over several trials in a day, or over several months. Does a competitive format inspire a student to hold out for longer (we call this hands-free arm wrestling) or will muscles fatigue at a similar rate regardless? That’s for your students to investigate!
Experiment: Modeling Rates of Fatigue
Want to see an example from a real HS Senior student? Check out her research poster titled:
Analyzing Muscle Fatigue Patterns Between Softball Players and Pianists.
What will you and your students discover?
As you can see above, there are a lot of ways you can take your PLTW lessons to the next level by engaging your students with hands-on electrophysiology. All of these tools are designed to be accessible and easy to use and, as you can see above, they are very affordable.
The above devices pair with free data-acquisition software called SpikeRecorder, which you can download on any smart device, tablet, Chromebook, or computer. For more information, please don’t hesitate to reach out to our General Email.
Your support helps us to improve our open-source devices, to perform research, and to write new experiments!
Together, we are working to inspire a new generation of neuroscientists, biomedical engineers, Doctors, and other STEM professionals. And for those students who do not pursue a STEM field, we are teaching them critical thinking skills, problem-solving strategies, and the knowledge they need to know to be scientifically literate citizens.
The Dreaded MS-LS1-8
Use the standards as an opportunity to inspire your students with Hands-On Neuroscience!
Heads up: This one’s for our Middle School Science teachers working to meet NGSS. It’s also for anyone interested in how Neuroscience labs can be used to meet your own curriculum standards!
MS-LS1-8 is a reportedly tough standard to address. It is on an island, so to speak, as it doesn’t neatly tie in with the other standards and teachers we talk to say it is one of the trickier ones for them to plan classes and labs around.
Today we’re going to share a few labs and experimental tools which won’t just meet the standard, but will expose your students to advanced science made simple and open up new potential avenues for their future learning.
Introducing Neurons and Action Potentials
|
Step one, we’re throwing that “assessment boundary” out the window. Neurons aren’t just for your advanced students, they’re for all your students (After all, they are who they are because of their neurons)!
https://twitter.com/orieshafer/status/1009517141354311680
The “mechanism for the transmission of this information” is truly a very finite and demonstrable concept and is well within the scope of a MS Science Classroom. We believe, and have seen time and time again, that by first introducing students to Neurons, Action Potentials, and the concept of Rate Coding, they will be better prepared to think about how stimuli are processed by living creatures.
Introducing Neurons and Action Potentials
|
Neurons are responsible for the flow of information in vertebrate and invertebrate creatures. They process external stimuli and send signals to different parts of the body to issue commands.
With a few simple classroom activities, we can demonstrate these principals LIVE. It’s not just a video (Though the below TED talk is a great Primer). This is a real, hands-on neuroscience lab that has been freed from the tethers of higher-ed and made accessible to Middle School teachers like you.
Using our Neuron SpikerBox, you can record Action Potentials in your classroom and introduce your students to the basic chemical principals which are responsible for this phenomena. Here students will address requirements 1a and 1b as they study and learn about Neurons from the demonstration, our experiment page, and an educational site (.edu) of their choosing.
Following their introduction, students can perform their very own “Galvani Volta” microstimulation experiment (like you saw in the TED talk above). This is designed to get them to understand the causal relationship between received stimuli and behavior.
Activity 3: Requirement 2 – Report your Findings!
As you might have guessed from our TED talks, we think teaching is an important part of learning! The second requirement of MS-LS1-8 offers students the opportunity to synthesize what they’ve learned from their experiments and present their findings to the class. Who knows, maybe they’ll want to take their project to the next level and continue their research for a Science Fair!
Required Kit: Neuron SpikerBox
|
The Neuron Spikerbox (or, for the discerning educator, the Neuron SpikerBox Pro) is designed to replace a $40,000 rack of graduate lab equipment… We believe that by making technology like this more affordable (at $130, that’s about a 99.7% discount) and accessible, we can inspire a new generation of neuroscientists and make a positive impact on students’ scientific literacy, making them more informed consumers of scientific information and opening up avenues of study they might not have even known existed. Join us in the Neuro-Revolution!
While we truly believe in introducing these concepts with the framing of a model organism, many of these same principles may also be illustrated in humans. You’ll want to check out the above video and the Human-Human-Interface. Trust me, it’ll blow your students away.
But wait, there’s more… More Standards!
|
There are other opportunities to begin tackling the standards with hands-on neuroscience. Starting with students as young as 4th grade, these real-world experiments can be brought to life in the classroom to give your students a foundation in several important fields of science while also keeping the bureaucrats happy!
The Muscle SpikerBox and Neuron SpikerBox labs can also be used to meet these following standards:
DCI: LS1.A, LS1.D
NGSS: 4-LS1-1, 4-LS1-2, MS-LS1-1, MS-LS1-2, MS-LS1-3
What will you and your students discover?
