Swift and agile musclework and bladework is all you need to be a good fencer. Or is it?
As it turns out thanks to Supriya Nair, an eighth-grader from Redmond, WA, the brain and heart have their fair share in it too! The young scientist’s research project on neurofencing just won her yet another first place at Washington State Science Fair (WSSEF), as well as a special award in Health & Medicine and a Broadcom MASTERS nomination!
To record and collect data needed for investiging the role of brain, heart and muscles, Supriya used a BYB combo, Heart & Brain SpikerBox and Muscle SpikerBox.
Supriya isn’t new to being a state science fair laureate. Last year, this young fencer won the WSSEF award for measuring her muscles’ reaction time before and after warm-ups to improve her lunge performance.
This time around, she added the brain and heart into the equation, measuring her EEG, EKG and EMG with and without a 15-minute warm-up.
Supriya and Sujit Nair establishing a new fencing technique: Neurofencing
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 exercise and performance in her favorite sport. Where other people see a self-evident truth that doesn’t need any questioning, this scientifically-minded middle-schooler saw a hypothesis that she can poke through to test it, quantify it, and prove it!
And what better way to do that than to:
sport a set of electrodes of a Neuron SpikerBox to capture an EMG signal from her right hand and right leg as she lunges,
measure her muscles’ reaction time from rest to touche in controlled circumstances, with and without 15-minute warm-ups, and compare the findings.
“I’d always hear it from coaches that I needed to do pre-bout exercise. But there was no quantitative data that would support it, just qualitative. And frankly, I was not very disciplined in warm-ups,” Supriya told us in a Zoom interview. That’s how she came up with the idea to eavesdrop on her muscles’ electrical activity using the SpikerBox her dad got her, and measure it to see whether it adds up to the hypothesis. And boom! Pre-bout exercise lasting only 15 minutes can improve a fencer’s performance by a whopping 15%, she discovered.
Distance learning just got a lot easier for the 7th grade students of Abington Avenue School (Newark, NJ)! Their teacher Khalil Gordon has recently won $1,000 in Neuron SpikerBox Bundles. More precisely, they will get 13 of BYB research kits that they can use for project-based science learning from the comfort of their PJs!
The funding is part of Society for Science & the Public’s STEM Research Grants totaling $100,000, awarded to 100 middle and high school teachers from all across the U.S. They put special emphasis on schools in underserved and underrepresented communities.
This year, the program was geared toward distance learning, striving to provide teachers with resources and tools that facilitate hands-on science labs that students can do at home. As we’ve already written, a Harvard study has shown how well our bioamplifiers perform in student dorms, living rooms, bedrooms, or just about anywhere.
Neuron SpikerBox and other standards-aligned Remote Labs lie at the intersection of various nerdy disciplines such as biology, electrophysiology, computer science. They are already in use in hundreds of U.S. schools, colleges and other institutions – from elementary to higher education. The tweets speak for themselves!
