I had two goals for Day 1: to familiarize/review the Visible Anatomy of the Brain and to assess what the students knew about neurobiology and what they are interested in. There is no better way to learn anatomy than to do a dissection… so that’s what we did! Students worked in groups of four to dissect a sheep brain (two pictures attached). The students are very confident in their knowledge of the different parts of the brain (see labeled diagram picture attached). I was very impressed with their ability to take in a lot of knowledge in a short period of time, as well as their ability to work in groups to perform the dissection. Way to go!

We talked about the scientific method and how to ask a scientific question. I asked the students to share a question they have about neurobiology with the knowledge they have right now. Most of the students proposed questions that are research-able (known). Our goal by the end of the week is to start asking questions that might not be known, but are answerable using the scientific method.

We started to talk about the function of the various parts and components of the brain, but we will dive into that more tomorrow when we tackle the Invisible Anatomy of the Brain. The students are very interested in memory, neurodegenerative diseases, and how nutrition affects your brain. We will tackle those topics in the next few days!

Dr. LaPointe

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