Hope College

The Hope College Brain Awareness Week had three primary components: Classroom and After-School Program visits A community keynote lecture A Community Brain Day Open House After the success of last years school visits and after school programs, we significantly increased our reach this year. This year we managed to reach 16 classrooms at 7 different schools within 3 different school districts along with 2 after school programs. Through these demonstrations we reached ~400 students, many of whom are underrepresented in STEM fields. This year we also incorporated both a pre and post assessment for classrooms that were 6th grade or above, to evaluate the educational effectiveness of our visit. These assessments were administered at least 1 day before our visit, and a minimum of 2 days after we visited. Assessments were conducted for 147 students. Students demonstrated a nearly 35% improvement in their score. Our Keynote Speaker was Dr. Francis X. Shen, who explored both neuroscience and law as well as religion and neuroscience. We estimate that ~150 college and community members attended his seminar. One of our big pushes this year was to improve community presence at this event and we estimate that between 25-35 community members were present at the event, a significant improvement from last year. After the talk a number of community members asked what other events existed for adults, suggesting this could be an area of growth for future years. Finally, on Saturday March 3rd, we hosted the Brain Day Open House. Once again, our Hope students did an amazing job interacting with the K-12 students and the event was incredibly successful for the second year in a row, attracting ~215 community members during the 3hr event.