Students from eastern Colorado had a chance to learn more about the brain and how it functions, thanks to a University of Colorado Boulder neuroscience outreach program. The Intermountain Neuroimaging Consortium’s program visited Northeastern Junior College on Friday to offer hands-on activities about the brain for 143 third through sixth graders.
Attending the event were students from schools in Sterling, Peetz, Julesburg, Haxtun, Akron, Strasburg, Idalia, Yuma, Holyoke, Limon and Burlington.
Nicole Speer, the consortium’s director of operations, said the outreach program helps students discover how the brain works, delve into how neuroscientists study the brain, and get excited about science in general and brain science in particular.
“Despite the fact that the brain is changing rapidly during late childhood and early adolescence, it is rare for neuroscience to be taught even at the high school level,” Speer said. “It is critical for children and adolescents to learn about how their brains work and how they can keep their brains working well as they navigate the developmental changes that occur during adolescence.”
The program was co-sponsored by the Northeast Board of Cooperative Educational Services (BOCES) and the East Central BOCES, which provide collaborative programs to rural Colorado school districts that have limited resources for gifted and talented programming, said Paula McGuire, gifted and talented coordinator for Northeast BOCES.
The day included four workshops, all led by CU Boulder students. In a workshop titled “It’s Electric,” students learned about neurons and synapse and got a hands-on picture of how action potentials and neurons work.
In a “Remember This…” workshop students did a bean bag toss wearing prism goggles to explore memory and used a mirror to draw a star instead of looking straight down directly at the paper.
A third workshop, “Can You Fix Your Brain?” had students learning about the different parts of the brain, as well as what a concussion is and why ignoring one can be dangerous. They also got to look at an actual brain and participated in an egg drop activity, where they built a “helmet” to go around the egg to prevent “brain injury” when the egg was dropped.
In the final workshop, “Neuro Inflammation,” students learned about inflammation and how it’s a sign of your body fighting off germs. Students also simulated the “epic battle” that goes on inside your body in a game of “Ninja,” which pitted two germs against three white blood cells.
The event also included a parent talk on “Understanding inflammation and minimizing its effects on brain function and development” by CU Boulder graduate student Kelsey Loupy. This talk discussed recent discoveries in the fields of neuroscience and physiology that explain how inflammation negatively affects the brain, how chronic physical, mental and emotional stress can lead to inflammation in the brain, and how a person can protect their brain from the negative effects of inflammation.
The neuroscience consortium is a state-of-the-art magnetic resonance imaging research facility located at the Institute of Cognitive Science at CU Boulder that features the work of neuroscientists, physicists and engineers from across the Rocky Mountain region who study addiction, pain, emotion, attention, sleep, learning and memory and develop innovative MRI methods and analysis techniques.
The consortium’s outreach programs, which are funded through a CU Boulder Outreach Award, bring this research to the community through neuroscience lessons and demonstrations on campus and in schools around the state, Speer said.
Callie Jones: 970-526-9286, cjones@journal-advocate.com
