Our NW Noggin participants delivered a sunrise presentation at WSU Vancouver this morning, as part of the Jay D. Miller Conference on best practices in health communication for the Neuroscience caregiver…
The conference was supported by WSU Vancouver, and organized by PeaceHealth Southwest Medical Center, with a focus on faculty in Neuroscience and Nursing…
Jeff Leake and Bill Griesar described NW Noggin, and introduced our participants, participating institutions, the importance of arts integration in successful student engagement, and several STEAM outreach efforts we currently have underway in the region…
Noggin/Twitter/Instagram/Facebook Web Guru Michael Miller, a recent graduate from PSU, then spoke about the ever growing list of educational resources our student participants have developed for our online Resources site. We also offer detailed posts, with links, pictures, lesson plans and worksheets included…
James Reling, a Psychology undergraduate from PSU, and a participant in last summer’s outreach program through MESA at WSUV, spoke about his own rewarding Noggin experiences, and his work designing original curricula, delivering instruction, and participating in educational assessment…
Brittany Wouden, a recent WSUV graduate, founder of Pop Up Gallery and another summer volunteer with MESA, then introduced her compelling myBrain! program, which superimposes an actual brain image on live video of someone looking at a screen…
Brittany’s captivating computer program, which is being developed with support from the Office of Research and Graduate Education at WSU Vancouver, offers tremendous potential for engaging the students we work with now – but also patients and their families – in efforts to understand structure/function relationships related to the brain and behavior…
Lizzy Tremaine, a graduate student in Psychology from PSU, then presented data she collected during Noggin summer outreach at MESA/WSUV, using Brittany’s myBrain! app. Assessment during this program was not a groan-inducing pencil and paper bubble test, with confusing questions written by education professionals at Pearson, but instead involved play with motivating games on myBrain! Students gradually “depolarized” their score from resting potential (a score of -65mV) down to the threshold potential of -55mV required for an action potential! They depolarized by answering relevant questions about biology, written by actual neuroscience graduates and undergraduates, concerning which regions and networks of their brains were engaged by various tasks and circumstances…
Brittany and Bill ended the Noggin presentation with explicit reference to the great potential of art and technology integration in effectively communicating science to students, the general public, and also patients and their families seeking greater understanding of stroke, trauma, dementia, aphasia, Parkinson’s disease, and other nervous system related disorders…
After the talk, we spoke with healthcare faculty and other professionals excited about outreach, myBrain! and STEAM. We also made a few pipe cleaner neurons, and introduced many to compelling, mobile representations of their own brains… 🙂
Many thanks to Sarice Bassin, the Director of the Stroke Program at Peace Health Southwest Medical Center, and Louise Jenkins, the Stroke and STEM Program Manager at PeaceHealth, for including us in the Jay D. Miller conference…
EXPLORE MORE: PeaceHealth SLIDES 11_2015 (ppt)
EXPLORE MORE: PeaceHealth SLIDES 11_2015 (pdf)