Institut de Neurociències de la Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

To celebrate the Brain Awareness Week (BAW), the Institut de Neurociències at UAB developed many outreach activities to promote the interest in Neurosciences, among small children and teenagers. Some days before the BAW started, we participated in the first edition of the Festival of Science and Technology for kids, the so-called Youth Mobile (YoMo) in Barcelona, where we organized different games and hands-on workshops. Among the activities, we designed a game to understand what emotions are and what happens in the brain when we feel them. We also prepared a microscopy workshop where they could observe and learn the different cell types of the nervous system. And finally, we set up a test, based on an interactive screen, in which children could explore what their facial expressions were like according with different emotions. Then, during the days of the BAW, students from two High School centres came to visit our facilities. They could experience how researchers work and had the chance of doing some laboratory tasks such as preparing samples for a western blot or using the microscope to observe brain cells. We also had activities for the youngest ones: researchers from our Institute went to different schools to introduce kids in the world of Neuroscience. They learned the fundamental brain areas, what the cells of the brain are, how they communicate and why we have emotions. We could carry out all these activities thanks to a grant of the Spanish Society of Neurosciences (SENC) and also by the enthusiasm and commitment of all our researchers. We would like to thank all of them.