Every fencer will hear it countless times: warm-ups are a MUST. Do them and they’ll bump up your performance. Skip them and you may end up hurting yourself. But not every fencer will ask why! Supriya Nair, a busy sixth-grader from Redmond, WA, decided to conduct an experiment and find out what the correlation is between […]

Fully remote, fully in-person, or somewhere in a sweet spot between the two. Those are the main safety concerns that are being laid right now in front of the decision makers, on behalf of students, parents, teachers and everyone around them, right at the kickoff of the new academic year. But whichever model prevails, it […]

The Khan Academy “2020 Breakthrough Junior Challenge” comes at a time when student engagement in STEM is more critical than ever. If you are a remote student or are a professional (or maybe parent!) educator attempting to transition rapidly into remote/home teaching strategies, this could be an excellent opportunity to turn an at-home-assignment into a […]

How the SpikerBox Revolutionized K12 STEM Education… and just what is a SpikerBox? Backyard Brains exists today because of a once-lofty goal: To turn a $40,000+ rack of graduate-level electronics into a $100 kit that students could use in the classroom to perform real, hands-on neuroscience experiments. A decade later, we have developed four lines of products […]

What did you do with your weekends when you were 10 years old? We bet it wasn’t participate in a women-driven hackathon where you developed your own functioning neural robot! (We bet you wish you did, though.) Arushi Nath, age 10, recently participated in Elle Hacks 2020, an all-women hackathon hosted by York University […]

Neuroscience Experiment Intern Wanted (Downtown Ann Arbor) Compensation: $15/hr based on 40-hour work weekEmployment type: full-time internship Backyard Brains is seeking a neuroscience intern to continue ongoing experiments! You:-A STEM undergrad, currently taking a break from the classroom. (Recent grad or gap year preferable)-Passionate about scientific discovery and designing innovative, impactful experiments-Experienced in or excited by a future […]

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 of […]

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, […]

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 […]

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 […]

A simple Neuroprosthetic may be made with anything and everything! Recently, I’ve been working with an 8th grade STEM teacher – Ms. Amy Farkas, from Riverview, MI – as she guides her students through a unit on prosthetics, neuroprosthetics, and other assistive technology. She began her unit having her students learn about hand articulation, tendons, and the […]