Proaction Lab

The Neuroscientists on-demand project offered students ranging from 6 to 15 years old the opportunity of connecting with neuroscience researchers from the Proaction Lab, University of Coimbra. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we held the event online and prepared two different activities according to student school years. Each session lasted about 30 minutes. Registrations were open for a couple of weeks and we were forced to close them early due to a high volume of registrations. For students between 6 and 10 years old, we prepared a presentation about the different brain areas and their functions. There was also a practical part where students could apply their knowledge by coloring a brain blank brain diagram. Here, they could correlate brain areas with their respective cognitive function. We held 9 sessions with 7 schools and some individual registrations, impacting a total of 110 students. For older students (11-15yo) we prepared a presentation about vision, detailing how the visual information travels from the eyes until the brain makes sense of the information around us. For the practical part, we introduced some visual illusions and challenged the students to try to explain what was happening in each case. This was the most interesting part for the students, for what I experienced. Many were the times that we continued after the scheduled time because there were many questions. We held 18 sessions with 6 schools and some individual registrations, impacting a total of 244 students

I can say there is a benefit for the researchers who feel appreciated and practice their science communication skills for future scicomm opportunities. Also and more importantly, teachers and students provided very positive feedback. Students, in particular, said they loved to learn new and exciting things about the brain. Teachers also gave positive feedback and asked us to continue to organize these types of events.