We’re ending the eventful year of 2022 grand style – by sending our gear on yet another trip across the world to further our #NeuroRevolution! This time, it was George Town in Penang, Malaysia, where school kiddos got to try their hands at our Claw.
The neuroscience booth was part of an exhibition funded by American Tech Corner-on-Wheels (ATCoW) and organised by Penang Science Cluster, specially designed for primary and secondary school students to spark their interest in STEM. Kudos to the ATCoW team, who have been to about 2 dozen schools and public events in 2022, impacting close to 10,000 students!
If you happen to be nearby, you can follow their FB Page and find updates on ATCoW here.
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This summer’s been a busy and buzzy season for spreading the word on DIY neuroscience! As part of the outreach activities, our crew hit Paris to attend FENS (Forum of European Neuroscience), Europe’s largest international neuroscience conference. We set up shop there and demoed the latest upgrades of our bioamplifiers. And got sore muscles from cycling along the Champs-Élysées!
The schedule was jam-packed with sci-comm activities, with over 7,500 fellow neuroscientists, graduate and doctoral students as well as teachers partaking in scientific symposia, poster presentations, workshops, mini conferences. (Hanging out, caffeinating and exchanging ideas with other nerdy folks at the rooftop terrace was also a huge part of it, especially in the mornings and evenings.)
Our booth was one of the liveliest spots. For who doesn’t itch to get a taste of a powerful brain-computer interface packed up into a couple of little orange boxes made world-famous by TED?
Or to engage in a cyborgian cup stacking contest using our robotic arm called The Claw…
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Our DIY neuroscience gear has already seen over a hundred countries all over the world. And it doesn’t intend to stop! So to scratch the gear’s itch, we decided to organize two more demoes in Europe—this time, in Branko Radicevic High School and Simeon Aranicki Elementary in the town of Stara Pazova (Serbia).
Our team members Stefana, Nestor and Vojin hit the biology classes with 1st- to 4th-graders, as well as 7th- and 8th-graders. There, they held workshops presenting our latest version of Human-Human Interface.
As ever, the kids were flabbergasted with the opportunity to hijack another person’s free will and “steal” their electrical impulse. But our team also planted some seeds that we hope will sprout into lifelong interest in robotics, computer science, medicine and related fields.
Aside from the sheer fun of arranging who’s going to control whom, the kids also got to measure the intensity of the impulse and figure out the muscle/fat ratio in our bodies. “You scratch my back, I scratch yours” gets a whole new meaning when Human-Human Interface, our mind-controlling device, enters the stage! Is it “I use your hand to scratch my back” now?
Over these past few months, we’ve been busy spreading the word to other corners of the planet too. From our old friends in Odessa, TX to the far-away Seoul, South Korea where we delivered some gear and taught neuroscience to North Korean refugees.
Do you have somewhere you think we should visit? Feel free to ping us on Twitter!
