ERIC TREKELL: We are going to move on and focus
on our last presentation our last session.
So our last session here is Best Practices
for an Online STEM Summer Camp Serving Neurodiverse Students.
So experiences working exclusively online.
And our presenters are, one of my colleagues here,
Tami Tidwell, Dr. Eric Chudler, who is, as I've noted,
the Education Director for the Neuroscience for Neurodiverse
Learners
grant, and Scott Bellman, another colleague here
at the University of Washington working
with this and many other reps.
So I will turn it over to you all to get us started.
SCOTT BELLMAN: Thank you, Eric.
On the first slide here today, it
lists the names of us presenters, and it also
adds that Dr. Chudler is in the Department of Bioengineering,
as well as the Center for Neurotechnology
here at the University of Washington.
And the slide includes a good number, maybe 36 or so,
images of brains and the interior of the skull
and from different angles.
And they're colored colorful.
It's really kind of a fun collage of images of the brain.
And the reason I describe that and mention it,
one is just so maybe people who can't
see it know what we're looking at,
but also, I wanted to talk to someone
about the ITEST program, which is an NSF program.
And it's an acronym for Innovative Technology
Experiences for Students and Teachers.
And so to run these grants, you need
to make a case to the National Science Foundation
that you are going to provide some innovative experiences
related to science and technology to students.
And so these images of these brains here,
kind of get me in the mood to talk about that a little bit.
So OK, on the next slide, it's the name
of our project, Neuroscience for Neurodiverse Learners.
And we wrote our proposal prior to the pandemic,
by quite a good measure.
Originally, we had been--
have to go back about five years.
We had been running different summer camps and things.
And I think Tami Tidwell, and maybe some others, Kayla
and others started saying, we should really
see if we could figure out a program
for our neurodivergent students.
That would be really cool.
And I think there's more and more of them showing up
to our stuff.
They're very excited.
Their parents tend to get involved, as well.
And so we started writing this grant proposal
to run this project.
The first year, I sat down with Dr. Chudler,
and we talked it through and tried
to figure out what we might want to do
and how we might want to do it.
And because of the timeline for getting that proposal turned
in, we decided to wait a year, but we had a rough idea
of what we wanted to do.
The very next year, we sat down and we
wrote the full proposal for NSF and got input
from all kinds of people.
But Dr. Chudler and I turned it in with some
of our other colleagues, Raj Rao and Sheryl Burgstahler,
Tami had a big hand in helping us design that.
And it was not funded.
And so we waited another year, and we spruced that one up
and turned it in.
And we did receive funding that third year.
We were really thinking hard about it.
So here we are.
We're in the middle of this project now,
but we did imagine it before the pandemic started.
So we were imagining activities on the University of Washington
campus hands-on stuff, with students coming and going,
some things where parents and teachers could
come on campus, as well.
And right when we got funded, the pandemic
forced us to change our approach.
And I have to give a lot of credit towards Tami
and some others that do it for quickly helping us figure out
how to run this as an online project, which we have been
doing for some time now.
But I'm excited to report that this summer we
are going to do a hybrid camp.
So we're going to have some sessions in person on campus,
and we're going to have some of them online.
And one of my colleagues might speak a little bit
later about some of the benefits we realized
of having some components online,
and why we're kind of excited to do that.
Pictured here, is Dr. Chudler holding a brain
model in his left hand and pointing to some students,
and they are looking at a slide about the brain, looks
like brain structures.
There's another image of me with a young man who's
looking at mammal brains that are suspended in epoxy,
and there are some small mammals.
And they're their actual brains there.
We're talking about them.
I don't know why I'm laughing.
I probably said a dumb joke.
In the bottom picture, there are some students,
and this was a classroom activity at the Center
for Neurotechnology.
And one of the activities we have done, for example,
is present the students with case studies
about the ethics of tinkering around with the human brain
and get their ideas about the ethical implications
of doing that.
And really challenge them to think hard about that.
So I don't know if we were doing that,
at this particular moment, but those
are the kinds of things that we do with our students.
The next slide here, is a picture
of our Drumheller Fountain, which
is on the University of Washington, Seattle campus,
cloudy day there with our beautiful brick buildings
in the background.
And there's another student pictured.
She is also looking at those small mammal brains
and probably trying to figure out what they're all about.
But our summer camp--
so for these students, they receive an introduction
to neuroscience and neural engineering and neuro-ethics,
and they work on scientific communication
and really, college preparation.
Partly geared towards STEM, partly
just geared toward being successful in high school
and being successful with those transitions.
And one of the things that we built into this project,
are some skills that we wanted to help students
with specifically.
And I think Lyla Crawford is here today.
She is our internal evaluator for this project.
So she helps us measure are we being successful in that area.
And I pulled our proposal.
I just wanted to share with you.
I thought you might be interested in some
of the things that we thought we could help these students
with during the project.
I'll just go through them really quickly.
There's nine of them.
One is initiating conversations.
One is correcting behaviors, kind of modifying as you go.
The third is requesting reasonable modifications
to the environment.
Number four is managing time and creating timelines
and that kind of thing.
Number five is building organizational charts
or some structures to conceptualize things.
Another one is focusing attention and listening.
Another one is requesting other academic accommodations,
beyond just modifications to the environment
using technology, such as alarms and calculators and other mind
mapping tools.
And the last one is articulating challenges
that students might be having.
I think a lot of you might agree with me,
those are skills that all students could work on.
Those are skills that I can work on,
and I'm a lifelong learner, always trying to improve.
So I'm not saying these students,
somehow need this maybe more than anybody else.
But I do believe these are areas where
we've heard from students, these are things I need help with.
And so we designed our program around those things.
So I will turn it over to Eric and Tami for the next section
of our talk here.
And take it away.
You're muted Dr. Chudler.
[LAUGHS] Eric, you're muted.
ERIC CHUDLER: We can go ahead to the next slide, Tami, thanks.
As Scott and Eric introduced me, I
am a neuroscientist at the University of Washington.
I've been doing science education
for probably close to 30 years with many different audiences
from kindergarteners up to graduate students
and professional development programs, as well.
But today, I'd like to talk to you about how we transition
from that in-person program to an online session, which
we've been doing for the past few years.
And I really appreciated the discussion
by Marisa and Sara and Ronda and also
this morning about some of the mechanics
about developing materials.
And it really helped me reflect on some of the things
that we've been doing.
So I want to talk about how we've
developed our online sessions.
And before we even start a session with these students,
we need to have an open line of communication.
And that is by letting the students know
about what to expect.
So the logistics of what is going to happen.
The plan, we provide our readings to them beforehand.
We give them very detailed instructions
about what we expect them to do before they even get
into the online environment.
So we communicate with them for several weeks
even before we do an online session.
And Tami will go into a little bit more details
about what that means behind the scenes.
Next slide, Tami.
During a session, we make sure that we
start the live transcripts, so we can
collect all of our discussion.
We make recordings because there are
some students that either can't attend or would
like to review the lesson.
So we make those recordings available to them.
We go through introductions, just
asking the students what they've been up to,
letting them to get to know each other,
really forming a cohort of students.
They're free to leave the cameras on, leave the cameras
off it's completely up to them.
And we usually, because there are between 10 and 20 students,
we don't have a lot of time for introductions.
But we really like to get to know them.
And I think the other students like to get to know each other,
as well.
We then present an agenda of what the session will do,
whether it's going to have breakout groups, whether we'll
have discussions.
We like to use a lot of visuals, videos.
Marisa and Sara on Wednesday, talked
about using multimedia to really engage these students.
So we really try to do that.
Really try to not just do a lecture.
In fact, I try to do as little lecture as possible,
and really try to incorporate hands-on things and discussion
to get the students talking with each other
and find out what they're learning
and how they're learning.
And Zoom has a lot of those capabilities.
We've all been doing this for a couple of years now.
So we use the chat in the polls.
We also like to get the students to share with each other what
they're doing.
And again, there's no pressure on the students.
They can share as much or as little as they'd like.
And we always end the session with reflections.
That is, we might ask the question,
what did you learn today?
What's one thing that you learned from the session today?
And we collect that information, so we can get an idea
about how we're doing.
And we can get an understanding of what
the students are understanding.
And if there's any misconceptions,
we can clear those up rather soon.
Next slide Tami.
I was a bit surprised about some of the things
that the students wanted.
And certainly, when I came in teaching undergrads
and other populations, I thought I
knew what I should be teaching.
And certainly, there are some basics
that I think are necessary to teach people
about how the brain works.
And I think it was Marissa on Wednesday
who said, watch your language when you talk to the students.
And you can imagine brain research and neuroscience,
it's a completely different language.
In fact, it's Greek and Latin.
That's where all of our terms in neuroscience come from.
And so speaking neuroscience is like learning another language.
And so there is a little bit of start-up time that's necessary.
So we do provide some background about how neurons
work, different brain regions.
I think that there's really only two or three concepts
that I must teach about, and that
is that the brain uses electrical signals and chemical
signals, and the brain has a tremendous capacity to change.
And that's the principle of neuroplasticity.
So those are really the only basic topics
that I want the students to learn.
And then we ask the students, what would you like to learn?
And I'm going to go through a couple of examples of what
we learned from the students.
What was most interesting to them.
But we like to have the students share their work.
And this is an example from the introductory lesson
about neuroscience.
When we talked about the basic structure of the nerve cell,
we asked the students to well, next week,
come back and show us a neuron and create a neuron
from whatever you can find around the house.
And these are just some examples.
The picture in the middle of this, a young student,
we got permission to use her picture here
because she was very proud of that picture of a neuron
that she put on her own face.
So she wanted to make sure that we used her and her picture.
But other students just got very creative
and just looked around the house,
and after they learned about the different parts of the neuron,
they built the model of neuron.
And they shared it with one another, using a Padlet.
And a Padlet, if none of you are familiar with a Padlet,
this is a very inexpensive-- and in fact, you
can have three Padlets for free.
It's a free service, online service.
The students upload their pictures.
I moderate it, so I make sure that it's
an appropriate picture to post.
And then it's posted.
The other students can look at it.
They can comment on their pictures and things like that.
So that's one way that they share their work.
Another way that they shared their work.
When we talked about sound, the students all
created musical instruments.
So some made percussion instruments.
Some people made string instruments,
but again, there were no rules really.
It was just find something around the house
and make an instrument.
And then during a session, we shared it with one another.
So that was a fun way to learn about sound.
Next slide.
When we did ask about, what do you want to learn?
So we learned earlier on Wednesday,
how students would like to learn,
but we also asked the students what would you like to learn?
And these are just a few of the topics
that they wanted to learn about.
So I created lessons and lectures
about these different things.
They wanted to learn about meditation, music.
They wanted to know about how Hollywood movies have
incorporated neuroscience and neurotechnology.
And there were also very interested in neuorethics.
And I want to go into, just briefly,
a couple of details about some of these particular lessons.
Next slide.
So neurotechnology and Hollywood,
the students were very interested in movies.
They, I guess, go to a lot of movies and they've seen--
now, is it really true, for example,
Limitless, that we only use 10% of the brain?
And is there a pill that could improve my memory?
So we talked about how Hollywood portrayed
neurotechnology and neuroscience.
What is possible.
What's possible now.
What might be possible in the future.
And then we got into some of the ethics too.
Well, if there was a pill that could
make you have a better memory, would this
be a good thing or a bad thing?
And there are a number of other movies
that we also talked about.
You might be wondering, well, how did Star Wars, The Empire,
Strikes back how did that have neuroscience in it?
Well, if you remember, there's one scene
where Darth Vader actually takes the light saber
and actually cuts Luke Skywalker's arm.
Luke Skywalker got a new arm, then
it was integrated into his nervous system.
So we talked a little bit about that.
Next slide, Tami.
The students were also very interested in music.
Music is a big part of young people's lives.
And so we first talked about, well,
how does sound convert to language?
How sound is actually air pressure waves.
How it stimulates the auditory nerve.
How that information gets to the brain.
How do we perceive it.
We also talked about, some students
had heard that, well, if you listen to the music of Mozart,
we heard that that makes you smarter.
Is that true?
So we actually read the original paper that was published,
and this was a bit of a challenge for the students
to do.
But I actually gave them the published paper,
and we went through it to find out,
what it was all this Mozart effect all about?
And is it actually true that if you
listen to the music of Mozart, does it make you smarter.
The answer-- as you might all know, the answer is no.
Listening to Mozart does not make you smarter.
Yet, there were a lot of industry
that was built around this myth about Mozart.
So the students were very interested in this.
This was up to them.
So those are just some of the examples
of what we learned from the students,
and how we created materials, so that we can really
engage with them because these were things
that they wanted to know about.
And I'll let Tami talk a bit about,
how some of these logistics worked.
TAMI TIDWELL: Yeah, behind the scenes
as we've talked through a lot of the CBI, the behind the scenes
is a lot of the things we talked about setting the group norms,
dividing up the duties behind the scenes,
not only for staff but for the students, allowing the time
for Q&A and reflections.
Slack behind the scenes so that staff could keep things moving
and rely on one another.
And using that Canvas structure.
That's something that we weren't able to do before the pandemic,
but we were able to do during the pandemic
and will continue to do, gives the students
all of that information ahead of time,
and some experience using Canvas in a safe space
before they go to college.
We also used a lot of direct communication.
Never failed, some students were late sleepers
or they would forget to log in, so being
able to use phone and text messages
and meet them where they were was really helpful.
We also used some of our past participants,
as youth leads, which is so impactful.
So in a picture on this slide, you
see Piper, who's one of our current interns.
We asked Piper to build that neuron ahead of time,
so students can see an example.
Now, Piper went way ahead above and beyond
of what we expected, and did a needlepoint of neurons,
but it really showed students that they could do it
however they wanted.
And in the picture that Dr. Chudler showed,
we saw people built them with carrots.
Someone did art on their face because they
were practicing makeup.
And so lots of different ways that these youth leads really
bridge that gap.
They're a very small number, and they really
lead by example and our leaders in many of the breakout rooms.
We also have individual session leaders, so
people who come back, maybe not for the whole time
but maybe for a panel, breakout room leaders, or speakers.
And we find that to be very helpful because again,
that near peer in a variety of student voices.
People will find someone who looks like them
or someone using a combination that they
might use in the future, in many of these leaders.
And last but not least, the parents.
We bridge that gap.
We realize that for much of many of these students' lives,
they've been the people leading the IEP meeting or a 504
meeting or an accommodations meeting.
So before camp, we do some Zoom orientations.
And we work with the students and the parents
to arrange those accommodations.
And it's the first time many times
where I'm speaking directly to the student,
and I say, parents, let them answer.
Or they can say, let's ask the parents, as opposed
to just having the parents answer these questions.
During camp, the parents have a parent night.
And we see a variety of involvement levels.
Some are extremely involved on a day to day basis.
And others, we see, maybe just at that orientation
and then again at closing ceremonies,
but after camp, we stay involved.
And we offer staff support to those parents going forward.
And that is a summary of our summer camp experience.
All of it, like Scott said, for this particular program,
was on Zoom, but we have years and years
of experience of that in-person, interactive science.
SCOTT BELLMAN: And I would add too, something that Tami
does particularly well.
We view this as DEI work, Diversity, Equity,
and Inclusion work.
And I think we are all learning more and more
the importance of asking the person, what do you need?
What would you like us to know?
How can we support you?
And Tami does a fantastic job of that before camp
when people enter our program.
And so it's just a great reminder to all of us,
just, I think, the more we can do that
with any group who's being discriminated against,
or left behind, or left out, or not
treated equitably that's usually the first stop.
So thank you, Tami, for that great work.
It's
TAMI TIDWELL: And I know somebody
wanted to give a kudos to this beautiful image.
ERIC TREKELL: Yeah, yeah, absolutely, absolutely,
Dr. Chudler has many more like it.
I've seen a few of them.
So at this point in time, we're open to a few questions
if anybody has any particular questions
relevant to this online operation you're
welcome to ask.
Either unmute, raise your hand, or post something in the chat.
SCOTT BELLMAN: I would add, too, if you're
looking for any resources or if you
think of something, again, that's not out there,
and you could use it, let us know.
We'll either build it, or we'll find it,
or we'll find someone to build it, or find someone to find it.
TAMI TIDWELL: Katherine has a great question,
do you allow students register for this program
from around the country?
The past two years, we've been really
fortunate to be able to have students participate
from around the country, and we have had students from the East
Coast from Texas all around.
But fortunately, this year, we're
able to get back into the labs and do
some interactive experiences here on our campus
here in Seattle.
So while we do have one student who
will be in town from New York, unless they
are going to be in the Seattle area during those two weeks,
unfortunately, we will not be having students
from around the country this year.
And that is an excellent question, too.
How do you find out about this opportunity?
That's a great question.
And I'm hoping that one of our magic tech people
will be popping that link into the chat momentarily.
And the camp is not for the full summer.
That was another question in the chat.
It is for two weeks.
We did have a priority deadline of March 31st,
but we are still accepting applications
for the regular deadline.
So if you do want to get this information out there,
please do.
And we do have students driving down from Bellingham
because we are only on campus for, I believe,
four of the days.
So it's not too bad to make that commute just a couple of days
during the summer.
SCOTT BELLMAN: And we work a lot with teachers
and other students and things to promote the camp.
ERIC TREKELL Kayla has posted the information about that.
You can follow that link in the chat.
SCOTT BELLMAN: Awesome.
ERIC TREKELL: Any other questions at this point?
Right, well, before we close out,
I do want to just reiterate my appreciation to you all
for joining us to begin with.
I hope you've had a positive experience
and learned some new things.
We do look forward to continuing this interaction.
We'll be connecting with you after this event,
inviting you to join a community of practice,
sending you all of the information we promised
to send you, both either in electronic format
or in a physical format.
I do also want to once again reiterate my appreciation.
While I've been the voice, for the most part,
this is a team effort the DO-IT staff,
and affiliated folks on the University of Washington
campus.
Andrea, Kayla, Tami, and Elizabeth
on the back end in particular.
Layla on the back end in particular,
with tech and support in a variety of ways.
And, of course, Sheryl, Eric, and Scott,
who work on the program to grant this particular grant
and many other initiatives, as well.
So thank you all for that.
If there is nothing else--
I see the chat moving.
Make sure that I'm not missing anything here.
Scott, do you have anything you'd
like to say to wrap up or shall I wish everyone a good weekend
and get off to your lunch if you haven't had it?
SCOTT BELLMAN: I do have just one quick thing,
and most of you have been around long enough,
you probably can predict what I'm about to say.
You'll be invited to complete an evaluation for our Capacity
Building Institute, and that's just so incredibly important
for us because we're going to have
more of these in the future.
And we take your feedback to heart.
We really do, and our funders, of course,
really appreciate it when we evaluate.
So do that If you find time.
That would be great, but mostly, thank
you so much for being here.
That's the main thing.
I really appreciated meeting all of you.
ERIC TREKELL: Yeah, and just to reiterate, Katherine
had asked about the videos.
The links will all be posted, and we'll be sending them
to you all by email.
All right.
Thank you all so much.
And feel free to portkey out.
I like using that term for Zoom.
So have a good weekend.