University of Arizona

The annual Tucson Festival of Books attracts more than 100,000 people during the 2-day course of the event, which is held on the University of Arizona campus. The College of Science, in collaboration with a number of sponsors, organizes a large section of the Festival called Science City, which has participants from nearly all of the science departments as well as many from the medical campus. Our booth, BRAINWORKS, was intended for the general public and was designed with 10 different hands-on demonstration sections, some of which would serve everyone, and other which would work best for different age groups (e.g., pipe-cleaner neurons for little kids, taste vs flavor jelly bean test for everyone, types of aphasia for elders.) Our activities included prism glasses, a station on traumatic brain injury, somatosensation, supertaster ID (plotted by male and female), moth electroantennograms, cockroach leg muscle spikes (Spiker Box), controlling locomotion with light (optogenetically modified Drosophila), temperature sensitivity (relative temperature), proprioception (using a massage wand for elbow tendon stimulation to disrupt finger to nose capability), and a brain zoo. In addition, we very successfully incorporated a group of “roving neuroscientists”, students wearing hand-made brain hats and lab coats to make them stand out. Each student had a simple activity – a book of illusions, jelly beans, or a yardstick reaction time.

We had lots of interest from families and from teachers, the latter asking about getting volunteers to come to their schools to make presentations. In one case, we were asked to participate in a large festival at the Tucson Hebrew Academy. Our Neuroscience Club students (undergraduates) did this, reaching about 200 people. Several classroom visits occurred and many people were referred to local resources.