Goal of the project

The goal of the project is to innovate teaching about the nervous system. This organ system is the physical substrate for motivation, learning and memory. Anyone who offers education, regardless of subject area, will therefore benefit from a proper understanding of this system. However, two major obstacles to understanding the nervous system are its complexity and inaccessibility. The nerve cells are small, with thread-like structures extending long distances throughout the body (including the brain) and connect to thousands of other cells. In addition, it is the nerve signal and precisely where it spreads throughout the network of nerve cells that is crucial for what we sense, perceive, feel, think, do and learn. These obstacles make the topic appear abstract and difficult for most students. The teaching often becomes lecture-based, which may reduce student motivation and therefore also learning outcomes. It is therefore a major pedagogical need for teaching tools that concretize and facilitate student-active learning in this topic.

Project activities

To innovate teaching about the nervous system, we attempt to concretize the relationship between structure and function of neural networks. To accomplish this, we will carry out four categories of activities:

1. The first category of activities is to develop an electronic brain building kit consisting of connectable, electronic neurons (projection neurons and inter neurons) that can be connected to form any neural network.
2. The second category of activities is to develop sensors (sensory cells) that can provide biological information to the neural network.
3. The third category of activities is to develop actuators (muscles) which can demonstrate the outcome of information processing in different neural networks.
4. The fourth category of activities is to implement the brain building kit in a pedagogical context. Here, the teaching tool will be integrated into a teaching strategy and tested on the target group, which includes pupils in primary and secondary school, as well as students at universities and colleges.

This research project is associated to the research group «Neurodidactics».

The project is funded by the University of Norway, Rector of NTNU, and the Department of Teacher Education, NTNU.