 We are going to move on and have our 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, Tammy Kidwell. 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 grants. So, I will turn it over to you all to get us started. Thank you Eric. On the first slide here today. It lists the names of us presenters and it, it also adds that Dr Chudler is in the Department of bioengineering, as well as the Center for neuro technology here at the University of Washington, and the slide includes a good number, maybe 36. So images of brains and the interior of the skull from different angles, and they're colored, colorfully 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 some, maybe people who can't see it know what we're looking at but also, I wanted to talk to Simone about the I test program which is an NSF program. 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 these brains here kind of get me in the mood to talk about that a little bit. So, okay, 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, we have been to go back about five years, we had been running different summer camps and things and I think Tammy Tidwell, and maybe some others Kayla and others started saying you know we should really see if we could figure out a program for our neurodivergent students that would be really cool, and I think you know there's more and more of them showing up to our stuff they're very excited. 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 try 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. And 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 Cheryl Bergstahler. Tammy had a big hand in helping us design that, and it was not funded. So we waited another year and we spruced that one up and turned it in and we did receive funding kind of 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 kind of forced us to change our approach. And I have to give a lot of credit towards Tammy 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. And here there's Dr. Chudler holding a brain model and 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 a mammal brains that are suspended in epoxy, and there's some small mammals, and there are their actual brains there we're talking about them I don't know why I'm laughing. Probably set a dumb joke. And the bottom picture there are some students. And this is 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 really challenged 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 drum heller fountain which is on the University of Washington Seattle campus cloudy day there with our beautiful brick buildings in the background. There's another student picture she is also looking at those small mammal brains, and probably trying to figure out to kind of what they're all about. But our summer camp. So for these students, they receive an introduction to neuroscience and neural engineering and neural ethics, and they work on scientific communication and really college preparation. They're partly geared towards STEM, and partly just geared toward being successful in high school, 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 Lila Crawford is here today she is our internal evaluator for this project. So she helps us measure you know 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 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 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 in 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. So I'm not saying these students somehow need this maybe more than anything anybody else. But I do believe these are areas where we've heard from students like these are things I need help with and so we kind of designed our program around those things. So I will turn it over to Eric and Tammy for the next section of our talk here and take your way. You're muted Dr. Chedler. We can go ahead to the next slide Tammy thanks. As Scott and Eric introduced me I am a neuroscientist at the University of Washington I've been doing science education for probably a 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 what how we kind of 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 Marissa and Sarah and Rhonda and also this morning about some of the mechanics about developing materials and it really helped me reflect on some of the things that that we've been doing. 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 mind of communication and that is by letting the students know about what to expect. So we have 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. We communicate with them for several weeks even before we do an online session and Tammy will go into a little bit more details about what that means behind the scenes. Next slide Tammy. Before in a session, we make sure that we start the live transcript 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 do 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 they're between 10 and 20 students we don't have a lot of time for introductions but really like to get to know them. Other students like to get to know each other as well. We then present an agenda of what the session will will will do whether it's going to have breakout groups whether we'll have discussions. We like to use a lot of visuals videos on Marissa and Sarah on Wednesday talked about using multimedia to really engage the students so really try to do that really try to not just do 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. So we've all been doing this for a couple 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 a question, what did you learn today what's one thing that you learn 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, Tammy. I was a bit surprised about some of the things that the students wanted to learn. Certainly when I came in, you know, 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, you know, watch your language. When you when you talk to the students, and you can imagine brain research and neuroscience. It is a completely different language. In fact, it's Greek and Latin, that's where all of our terms and neuroscience come from. So speaking neuroscience is like learning another language. And so there is a little bit of startup time that's necessary so we do provide some background about how neurons work different brain regions. I think that there's really only a 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. 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 examples of what we learned from the students, what was most interesting to them. These 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 that the picture in the middle of this young student. She had 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 north, 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 have to 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 shared 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 with one another. So that was a fun way to learn about sound. And next slide. When we did ask about the, 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 a meditation music. They wanted to know about how Hollywood movies have incorporated neuroscience and neuro technology, and they were also very interested in neuroepics and I want to go into a cut just a briefly, a couple of details about some of these particular lessons next slide. So neuro technology and Hollywood. The students were very interested in movies they, I guess, go to a lot of movies and they've seen, you know, 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. And we talked about how Hollywood portrayed neuro technology and neuroscience. What is possible, what's possible now what might be possible in the future, and then we've got some of the ethics to. 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 wonder in what about how did Star Wars empire strikes by how did that have neuroscience in the past. And remember there's a one scene where Darth Vader actually takes the lightsaber and actually cuts Luke Skywalker's arm Luke Skywalker got a new arm that was integrated into his nervous system. So we talked a little bit about that. Next slide Tammy. 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 brand. How do we perceive it. We also talked about some students had heard that, well if you listen to the music of Mozart. 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 all about. And is it actually true that if you listen to the music of Mozart doesn't make you smarter. The answer as you might all know the answer is no listening to Mozart does not make you smarter. Yet, there are a lot of industry that was built around this myth about Mozart. The students were very interested in this and this was 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 Tammy talk a bit about how some of these logistics work. So behind the scenes as as we've talked through a lot of this 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 amp a and reflections 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 use a lot of direct communication. We never failed students 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 on the slide you see Piper who's one of our current interns. We asked Piper to build that neuron ahead of time so students could see an example. Now, Piper went way ahead of above and beyond of what we expected and did a needle point of neurons, but it really showed students that they could do it however they wanted in the picture that Dr. Chudler showed we saw people build them with carrots. Someone drew did art on their face because they were practicing make make up and so lots of different 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 and 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 and the variety of student voices, people will find someone who is like them or someone using accommodation that they might use in the future in many of these leaders. And last but not least the parents we we bridge that gap that they 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 they're, you know, we see a variety of involvement levels some are extremely involved on a day to day basis, and others we see, maybe just at the, 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. And I would add to something that Tammy does particularly well. We view this as DEI work right 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 what would you like us to know, how can we support you. And Tammy 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. We're not treated equitably. That's usually the first stop right so so thank you Tammy for that, that great work. And I know somebody wanted to give a kudos to this beautiful image. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Dr. Chandler has many more like it. I've seen a few of them. At this point in time. We're open to a few questions if anybody has any particular questions relevant to this online operation. Welcome to ask either unmute raise your hand or post something in the chat. If you had to if you're looking for any resources or if you think of something again it's not 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. Catherine has a great question to allow students to 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 close from Texas all around, but unfortunately or 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. That is an excellent question to 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 campus 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 31, but we are still accepting applications for the regular deadline. Do you 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. And we work a lot with teachers and other students and things to promote the camp. And Kayla has posted the information about that. You can follow that link in the chat. Awesome. 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. We've had a positive experience and learned so many things. We do look forward to continuing this interaction will be connecting with you after this event, inviting you to join community of practice, sending you all of the information we promise to send you both either an electronic format or a physical format. I do also want to once again reiterate my appreciation while I've been the voice for the most part. And this is a team effort to do it staff and affiliated folks on the University of Washington campus. Andrea Kayla Tammy and Elizabeth in the back on the back end in particular, Lila on the back end in particular with tech and support in a variety of ways. And of course, Cheryl 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. Do you have anything you'd like to say to wrap up or shall I wish everyone a good weekend and and get off your lunch if you haven't had it. I just one quick thing and you, most of you have been around long enough you probably can predict what I'm about to say. So we've 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, you know, 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. Great. Catherine asked about the, 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 to port key out. I like using that term for zoom. So, good, good weekend.