SFN 2019 is over. It came and went so quick! But now our, and your, work really gets grooving. From poster sessions, to chats, to socials, and time well spent at our exhibit(!), we hope everyone who attended enjoyed their time in Chicago! We know we did! And if you didn’t make it out (probably many […]

Continuing my Research Hi Everyone! My name is Pranav Senthilkumar and I’m a rising senior at Mission San Jose High School in California. I have previously shared my work devising a neuroprosthetic device with the help of Dr. Marzullo, and now with his excellent guidance, I am starting another major neuroscience project.

As educators, we are always trying to keep up with our students. We understand that technology is evolving at a rapid pace, and the way students entertain themselves in their free time is changing. Video games are an incredibly popular activity among students of all ages. To best engage with students, our aim is to blend […]

Hot off the presses! Read all about it! Mantis Shrimp Wrangler Extraordinaire Dan has been published! Backyard Brains Senior Fellow Dan Pollack has had his research published in JUNE, the Journal for Undergraduate Neuroscience Education: “An Electrophysiological Investigation of Power-Amplification in the Ballistic Mantis Shrimp Punch.” The paper offers a rundown of Dan’s research, culminating […]

Bring this Experience to your Classroom! This fall, we worked with two Michigan Public Libraries to bring a “DIY Neuroprosthetics Workshop” to local communities. The workshops were designed to introduce students and interested adults to the fundamentals of neuroscience: The experience began with participants recording their first Action Potential with the Neuron SpikerBox, then seeing […]

Whenever we work with K12 teachers or are in the classrooms ourselves, we are always delighted to hear about and see the enthusiasm that students have for engineering devices that help people. We like to call this “Tech that Helps.” As neuroscientists, we use lots of different tools to study, diagnose, and attempt to heal […]

Last summer, we shared details about how the Summer Neuroscience Program at Rockefeller helped make an impact on a group of high schoolers from different backgrounds across NYC. The Summer Neuroscience Program (SNP) is self-described as “a two-week course aimed at introducing talented and enthusiastic high school students to the brain,” but could more affectionately be described […]

Many educators we work with travel to conferences and trainings around their home states and countries, and a few of them even take students! Amy Farkas, from Riverview Michigan, (Read more about her class here) took her 8th graders this past year to a handful of conferences to bring what they’ve learned to the real […]

Last school year we worked with teachers across the country to help bring real, meaningful neuroscience lessons into their classrooms. From 5th grade to university, educators and students loved learning about how the brain works, how we study the brain, and how we engineer devices that can be controlled by the brain! One educator, in […]

This past summer, we worked with teachers and educators during a number of workshops to help empower them to bring DIY Neuroscience to their classrooms. One workshop, hosted by one of our colleagues at University of Chicago, brought Backyard Brains tools and training to 7th grade teachers in the Chicago area. Taken from the National […]

Last year, we were introduced to a number of teachers who wanted to fund their classroom through DonorsChoose–check out our previous blog post about it! Mrs. Kielma is a biology and biotechnical engineering teacher at an urban school, and her DonorsChoose campaign was for a Human-Human Interface to explore biomedical engineering and neuroprosthetics. In her […]

Recently we hosted a teacher training workshop in San Diego, featuring some of our newest tools and some new pedagogical strategies! The focus was on the Muscle SpikerBox Pro, Reaction Timer, and Reflex Hammer, which you can see featured in this TEDx Detroit Talk. We received a lot of great feedback, and as part of our “open-source” nature of […]