Understanding the brain is a fascinating challenge, captivating the scientific community and the public alike. The lack of effective treatment for most brain disorders makes the training of the next generation of neuroscientists, engineers and physicians a key concern. Over the past decade there has been a growing effort to introduce neuroscience in primary and secondary schools, however, hands-on laboratories have been limited to anatomical or electrophysiological activities. Modern neuroscience research labs are increasingly using computational tools to model circuits of the brain to understand information processing. Here we introduce the use of neurorobots - robots controlled by computer models of biological brains - as an introduction to computational neuroscience in the classroom. Neurorobotics has enormous potential as an education technology because it combines multiple activities with clear educational benefits including neuroscience, active learning, and robotics. We describe a 1-week introductory neurorobot workshop that teaches high school students how to use neurorobots to investigate key concepts in neuroscience, including spiking neural networks, synaptic plasticity, and adaptive action selection. Our do-it-yourself (DIY) neurorobot uses wheels, a camera, a speaker, and a distance sensor to interact with its environment, and can be built from generic parts costing about $170 in under 4 h. Our Neurorobot App visualizes the neurorobot's visual input and brain activity in real-time, and enables students to design new brains and deliver dopamine-like reward signals to reinforce chosen behaviors. We ran the neurorobot workshop at two high schools (n = 295 students total) and found significant improvement in students' understanding of key neuroscience concepts and in students' confidence in neuroscience, as assessed by a pre/post workshop survey. Here we provide DIY hardware assembly instructions, discuss our open-source Neurorobot App and demonstrate how to teach the Neurorobot Workshop. By doing this we hope to accelerate research in educational neurorobotics and promote the use of neurorobots to teach computational neuroscience in high school.

中文翻译：

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高中生神经机器人研讨会提高了计算神经科学的能力和信心。

了解大脑是一项引人入胜的挑战，吸引了科学界和公众。大多数脑部疾病缺乏有效的治疗方法，这使得下一代神经科学家、工程师和医生的培训成为一个关键问题。在过去的十年中，越来越多的努力在中小学引入神经科学，但是，动手实验室仅限于解剖学或电生理学活动。现代神经科学研究实验室越来越多地使用计算工具来模拟大脑回路以了解信息处理。在这里，我们介绍了神经机器人的使用 - 由生物大脑的计算机模型控制的机器人 - 作为对课堂计算神经科学的介绍。神经机器人技术作为一种教育技术具有巨大的潜力，因为它结合了多种活动，具有明显的教育优势，包括神经科学、主动学习和机器人技术。我们介绍了一个为期 1 周的介绍性神经机器人研讨会，该研讨会教授高中生如何使用神经机器人研究神经科学中的关键概念，包括尖峰神经网络、突触可塑性和自适应动作选择。我们自己动手 (DIY) 的神经机器人使用轮子、摄像头、扬声器和距离传感器与其环境交互，并且可以在 4 小时内用成本约为 170 美元的通用部件构建。我们的 Neurorobot 应用程序实时可视化 Neurorobot 的视觉输入和大脑活动，使学生能够设计新大脑并提供类似多巴胺的奖励信号以加强所选行为。我们在两所高中（总共 n = 295 名学生）举办了神经机器人研讨会，并发现学生对关键神经科学概念的理解和学生对神经科学的信心有了显着提高，正如研讨会前/研讨会后调查所评估的那样。在这里，我们提供 DIY 硬件组装说明，讨论我们的开源 Neurorobot 应用程序并演示如何教授 Neurorobot Workshop。通过这样做，我们希望加速教育神经机器人的研究，并促进使用神经机器人在高中教授计算神经科学。在这里，我们提供 DIY 硬件组装说明，讨论我们的开源 Neurorobot 应用程序并演示如何教授 Neurorobot Workshop。通过这样做，我们希望加速教育神经机器人的研究，并促进使用神经机器人在高中教授计算神经科学。在这里，我们提供 DIY 硬件组装说明，讨论我们的开源 Neurorobot 应用程序并演示如何教授 Neurorobot Workshop。通过这样做，我们希望加速教育神经机器人的研究，并促进使用神经机器人在高中教授计算神经科学。