Higher School of Economics (National Research University)

This year it was the 2nd BAW edition, which doubled our last year success having > 750 participants. Our activities included: – Interactive lectures for senior school children about the general principles of brain structure and functioning, research methods, and the impact of various factors (nutrition, stress, drugs, etc.) on brain activity. We also talked about university programs in Neuroscience and possible research careers. These lectures took ~90 min but sometimes we had to answer questions for 1 more hour! – Open-public science-popular lectures on Neuro-Economics and Decision Making – Open-public science-popular lectures given by invited speakers from Moscow. We expected ~150 participants but in fact we had 280 registered attendees. We relate this to the fact that people didn’t want to miss an opportunity to meet a scientist from another city. Now we consider organizing more lectures with invited specialists from other cities and countries. – Do-It-Yourself workshops for children. For 6-10-year old children they included a short talk (~10min) followed by games and hand-crafting exercises. We had 4 different programs: “Emotions: meet the heroes of ‘Inside Out’ ”, “How to read your mind?”, “Brain: let’s get acquainted!”, “Brain. From jelly-fish to humans.” For older participants (10+) we proposed a new program “Deciphering the Magic Brain Codes” when children and their parents created a brain-computer interface using simple EEG systems. As this was so exciting we could not find the room for everyone and decided to continue these workshops on demand. In general, we feel that we made our BAW interesting and engaging. It was a pleasure to hear people saying that it was nice last year but this year it is was even bett

During BAW we received new offers and invitations from both scientific and public organizations, as well as from media representatives. We met very motivated students who would like to continue their career in science and asked about a possibility to have a training at our laboratory. Finally, we realized that organizing BAW significantly contributes to the visibility and recognition of our organization: some of the participants said that they decided to come to our events because they have noti

When organizing events for little children we advise to keep in mind that they are very curious and ask many questions – so do not plan 2 events one immediately after another if you do not want to delay the 2nd event.