Related Post: High School Senior Makes an Award-Winning Prosthetic Finger Using Muscle SpikerShield Tens of thousands of dollars: that’s how much people have to pay for a robotic prosthesis — not even the most sophisticated type. It’s what prodded Jorge Iglesias Costas, at the time a 17-year-old high-schooler in Barcelona, to try and design a low-cost […]

A pump made of two plastic syringes and a pushing block powered by a stepper motor, one of our Muscle SpikerShields and a 3D-printed base — that’s all that Kiley Branan, a high school senior from Indiana, needed to put together a prototype of a finger that you can open and close by flexing your […]

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 the […]

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 […]

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 particular, […]

The Third Thumb An 8th Grader’s Exploration in DIY Neuroprosthetics Several months ago, a crowdfunded classroom got their hands on several of our neuroprosthetic kits – like The Claw and the Muscle SpikerShield Bundle. This allowed students in Nokomis Regional schools to begin experimenting with hands-on neuroscience experiments! One of the students, 8th grader Kaiden K., was interested in developing a prosthetic, but […]

“A new generation of students has access to 3D printers and other DIY technology…” I was speaking recently to one of our colleagues at Temple University about a project several of his students were working on, and he said something that really struck me, “these students are the first generation to have grown up with 3D printers […]