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 particular, […]

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 Center […]

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 our company, […]

Grant Providers Agree, Neuroscience is Worth the Investment Several months ago, Mr. Skoczylas, an Elementary Tech Coordinator, was trying to figure out how to best introduce young students in his district to the intersection of Life Sciences and STEM. As you know, at Backyard Brains, our tools and labs make it easy for students to […]

The second half of the Summer Senior Research Fellowship had the students and faculty traveling across Europe as they moved from Munich to Belgrade. In Belgrade, the new base of operations was the Center for Promotion of Science, (an incubator for scientists!) and the team was able to wrap up their projects in a tour […]

A Middle School Teacher Testimonial! We met Deborah Antrim, a medical pathway and 8th-grade teacher in Rio school district, at CSTA this past year, and she told us all about the successes she had had with Backyard Brains gear in her classes and summer camps! We asked her to share some pictures and details about how […]

The Leadership Initiatives Advanced Medical Neuroscience Summit is a program that’s available for rising freshmen in high school to rising freshmen in college that gives students the opportunity to live for a short time at a college campus (Gorgeous Georgetown), attend lectures and learn from neuroscience professors, tour high-tech labs, and perform hands-on research. This […]

We visited University of Michigan’s campus during their annual “Xplore Engineering” camp. This multi-day event brings grandparents, parents, and their young scientists from all across the country to lovely summer Ann Arbor for a few days of science and engineering experiential opportunities.

Failure is an important part of theReiterative Design Process! For some students, dealing with failure can be tough. It’s frustrating to encounter obstacles in science! And for teachers – how do you grade a project when a student puts a lot of effort in, but keeps hitting roadblocks? Many of you already teach like this, but […]

This year, we were excited to release two new kits in concert with our Muscle SpikerBox Pro, kits that are designed to help capture very precise data about reflexes (The Reflex Hammer) and reactions (The Reaction Timer). It didn’t take long for students to start getting their hands on these tools, and we are excited […]

Scientific publications are a bit more formal than our preferred mode of “sharing the good word” of DIY Neuroscience–our TED videos are a great example of our normal route. But, scientific publications are a currency of authority, and they do offer the opportunity to lay out, very precisely, why we think that students around the […]