Many of us were staying in the “BYB Barracks”—a beautiful AirBnB that would have been nice for 2-3 people but was a little cramped for 5, on the famous Knez Mihailova street (24 Knez Mihailova, to be exact). When we arrived at the AirBnB, the owner of the apartment, Sanvila Popovic, greeted us in a very friendly, gracious way. When I asked her if she was Serbian, she replied: “Yes, I was born in this building, and my grandfather was an architect who designed this building as well. His name is Branko Popovic, and you can read about him on Wikipedia. He was a bit of a polymath: an architect, the dean of engineering faculty at the University of Belgrade, and a surrealist painter. Unfortunately, with the rise of the communist party in Yugoslavia, he was arrested and killed for his political views in 1944. I never had the chance to know him.”
Given such an interesting, tragic, and personal story that she shared with us, we became text-message friends with Sanvila, exchanging messages about Serbian culture, things to do in Belgrade, and even texting her when we visited the National Gallery in Belgrade and saw some of the paintings of her grandfather Branko.
This summer, we’ve beat our own record: in just under two weeks, 20 high-schoolers created nine projects using what is shaping up to be our most creative neuroscience kit ever!
The tool (or should we say meta-tool?) called Neuro:Bit lets you build brain-machine interfaces (BMIs) that work using your body’s electrical signals. Depending on the project, you can design and 3D-print the case of a desired BMI, integrate with an existing gadget such as bluetooth headphones, or even cut the case out of cardboard. What you need are two things: a Neuro:Bit to pick up your body’s electrical signals that power the interface, and one or more Micro:Bits, the famed microcontrollers designed by Microsoft and BBC, to add more functionality.
This summer school was the first time the Neuro:Bit was let into the wild. Straight away, it demonstrated an ability to integrate different disciplines. “It’s another of our democratic tools where neuroscience overlaps with electrical engineering, physical science, math, anatomy, so you can easily inject or sprinkle neuroscience into the classroom. When you look at things that inspire people, it’s all interdisciplinary and it’s all about collaborations between individuals rather than competition,” says Alex Hatch, our product designer, inventor and roboticist.
So who are the kids who gave a whirl to Neuro:Bit this summer? They all come from Belgrade or thereabouts, and most of them had little to no prior experience with programming or building things. Yet it didn’t stop them from creating their very own BMIs with the help of several undergraduates from the University of Michigan as well as our resident scientists. “It tooks them just a few days to go from zero to making computers that do amazing stuff,” our co-founder Dr. Greg Gage points out. “Last year, we developed a whole bunch of neuroscience experiments. But this year, we decided to do something different. We’re going to use the info that comes out of the brain (through muscles, eyes, heart) and have them take that info and convert it into a creative devices. It lays on the creativity aspect.”
The kids worked in 2 separate cohorts, having only five days each to build their machines from scratch. All the projects are now getting written up in our docs repository, along with full tutorials as well as Python/Java Script codes and ready-made STL files for 3D printing. Meanwhile, here’s a foretaste of what you can expect!
