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Neurorobotics Workshop for High School Students Promotes Competence and Confidence in Computational Neuroscience

Understanding the brain is a fascinating challenge, captivating the scientific community and the public alike. The lack of effective treatment for most brain disorders makes the training of the next generation of neuroscientists, engineers and physicians a key concern. Over the past decade there has...

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Autores principales: Harris, Christopher A., Guerri, Lucia, Mircic, Stanislav, Reining, Zachary, Amorim, Marcio, Jović, Ðorđe, Wallace, William, DeBoer, Jennifer, Gage, Gregory J.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Frontiers Media S.A. 2020
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7033397/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32116636
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fnbot.2020.00006
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author Harris, Christopher A.
Guerri, Lucia
Mircic, Stanislav
Reining, Zachary
Amorim, Marcio
Jović, Ðorđe
Wallace, William
DeBoer, Jennifer
Gage, Gregory J.
author_facet Harris, Christopher A.
Guerri, Lucia
Mircic, Stanislav
Reining, Zachary
Amorim, Marcio
Jović, Ðorđe
Wallace, William
DeBoer, Jennifer
Gage, Gregory J.
author_sort Harris, Christopher A.
collection PubMed
description Understanding the brain is a fascinating challenge, captivating the scientific community and the public alike. The lack of effective treatment for most brain disorders makes the training of the next generation of neuroscientists, engineers and physicians a key concern. Over the past decade there has been a growing effort to introduce neuroscience in primary and secondary schools, however, hands-on laboratories have been limited to anatomical or electrophysiological activities. Modern neuroscience research labs are increasingly using computational tools to model circuits of the brain to understand information processing. Here we introduce the use of neurorobots – robots controlled by computer models of biological brains – as an introduction to computational neuroscience in the classroom. Neurorobotics has enormous potential as an education technology because it combines multiple activities with clear educational benefits including neuroscience, active learning, and robotics. We describe a 1-week introductory neurorobot workshop that teaches high school students how to use neurorobots to investigate key concepts in neuroscience, including spiking neural networks, synaptic plasticity, and adaptive action selection. Our do-it-yourself (DIY) neurorobot uses wheels, a camera, a speaker, and a distance sensor to interact with its environment, and can be built from generic parts costing about $170 in under 4 h. Our Neurorobot App visualizes the neurorobot’s visual input and brain activity in real-time, and enables students to design new brains and deliver dopamine-like reward signals to reinforce chosen behaviors. We ran the neurorobot workshop at two high schools (n = 295 students total) and found significant improvement in students’ understanding of key neuroscience concepts and in students’ confidence in neuroscience, as assessed by a pre/post workshop survey. Here we provide DIY hardware assembly instructions, discuss our open-source Neurorobot App and demonstrate how to teach the Neurorobot Workshop. By doing this we hope to accelerate research in educational neurorobotics and promote the use of neurorobots to teach computational neuroscience in high school.
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spelling pubmed-70333972020-02-28 Neurorobotics Workshop for High School Students Promotes Competence and Confidence in Computational Neuroscience Harris, Christopher A. Guerri, Lucia Mircic, Stanislav Reining, Zachary Amorim, Marcio Jović, Ðorđe Wallace, William DeBoer, Jennifer Gage, Gregory J. Front Neurorobot Neuroscience Understanding the brain is a fascinating challenge, captivating the scientific community and the public alike. The lack of effective treatment for most brain disorders makes the training of the next generation of neuroscientists, engineers and physicians a key concern. Over the past decade there has been a growing effort to introduce neuroscience in primary and secondary schools, however, hands-on laboratories have been limited to anatomical or electrophysiological activities. Modern neuroscience research labs are increasingly using computational tools to model circuits of the brain to understand information processing. Here we introduce the use of neurorobots – robots controlled by computer models of biological brains – as an introduction to computational neuroscience in the classroom. Neurorobotics has enormous potential as an education technology because it combines multiple activities with clear educational benefits including neuroscience, active learning, and robotics. We describe a 1-week introductory neurorobot workshop that teaches high school students how to use neurorobots to investigate key concepts in neuroscience, including spiking neural networks, synaptic plasticity, and adaptive action selection. Our do-it-yourself (DIY) neurorobot uses wheels, a camera, a speaker, and a distance sensor to interact with its environment, and can be built from generic parts costing about $170 in under 4 h. Our Neurorobot App visualizes the neurorobot’s visual input and brain activity in real-time, and enables students to design new brains and deliver dopamine-like reward signals to reinforce chosen behaviors. We ran the neurorobot workshop at two high schools (n = 295 students total) and found significant improvement in students’ understanding of key neuroscience concepts and in students’ confidence in neuroscience, as assessed by a pre/post workshop survey. Here we provide DIY hardware assembly instructions, discuss our open-source Neurorobot App and demonstrate how to teach the Neurorobot Workshop. By doing this we hope to accelerate research in educational neurorobotics and promote the use of neurorobots to teach computational neuroscience in high school. Frontiers Media S.A. 2020-02-13 /pmc/articles/PMC7033397/ /pubmed/32116636 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fnbot.2020.00006 Text en Copyright © 2020 Harris, Guerri, Mircic, Reining, Amorim, Jović, Wallace, DeBoer and Gage. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
spellingShingle Neuroscience
Harris, Christopher A.
Guerri, Lucia
Mircic, Stanislav
Reining, Zachary
Amorim, Marcio
Jović, Ðorđe
Wallace, William
DeBoer, Jennifer
Gage, Gregory J.
Neurorobotics Workshop for High School Students Promotes Competence and Confidence in Computational Neuroscience
title Neurorobotics Workshop for High School Students Promotes Competence and Confidence in Computational Neuroscience
title_full Neurorobotics Workshop for High School Students Promotes Competence and Confidence in Computational Neuroscience
title_fullStr Neurorobotics Workshop for High School Students Promotes Competence and Confidence in Computational Neuroscience
title_full_unstemmed Neurorobotics Workshop for High School Students Promotes Competence and Confidence in Computational Neuroscience
title_short Neurorobotics Workshop for High School Students Promotes Competence and Confidence in Computational Neuroscience
title_sort neurorobotics workshop for high school students promotes competence and confidence in computational neuroscience
topic Neuroscience
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7033397/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32116636
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fnbot.2020.00006
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