Noggin volunteers generated a little STEAM this week, during a visit to Sarah Morgan’s arts classroom at Portland State University…
Art students joined Lauren Wilgus, Austin Howard, Jacob Schoen and Alex Voigt from PSU to discuss how the arts engage and motivate, and allow for personal, relevant, creative expression and exploration of ideas and concepts in many fields, including neuroscience…
We also spoke about cross-disciplinary outreach opportunities available through nwnoggin, and the rewards of working with K-12 students, many unmotivated and bored by a focus on testing, with a “one right answer” approach to questions. Much can be learned by taking time to investigate what’s being taught, and explore concepts through art…
The parallels between art and science can be striking: both are often messy, and require trial and error, the honing of precise techniques, hard-won lessons from mistakes and failures, and creative research, scrutiny and expression of convictions and ideas…
Jeff Leake then introduced a project to explore the organization of nervous systems. Any organism requires sensory input – information about various aspects of the physical world, including the state and position of its own body. And it must also respond to inputs with changes in position, and in aspects of its internal environment…
Students were asked to design their own animal, with articulated limbs, and particular sensory and motor features, hinge those limbs with brads, and then illustrate the network of afferent (sensory) and efferent (motor) neurons required to make it detect, and respond to its environment…
As we worked, we also brought out human brains, to consider the vast complexity of the 100 billion or so neurons that receive our sensory input, and electrically distribute it along precise networks for perception, drawing our attention, biasing our decisions, recalling our memories, and planning the movements of muscles controlled by efferent outputs to the body required for complex behavior in the world…
PROJECT PDF: nervous system puppet
Many thanks to Sarah Morgan for welcoming us back to class!
