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BrainExplorer: an innovative tool for teaching neuroscience

Published: 11 November 2012 Publication History

Abstract

Neuroscience has recently brought many insights into the inner workings of the human brain. The way neuroscience is taught, however, has lagged behind and still relies on direct instruction or textbooks. We argue that the spatial nature of the brain makes it an ideal candidate for hands-on activities coupled with a tangible interface. In this paper we introduce BrainExplorer, a learning environment for teaching neuroscience. BrainExplorer allows users to explore neural pathways on a custom tabletop platform. We conducted an evaluation with 28 participants comparing students who learned neuroscience content through using BrainExplorer with students who learned by reading a textbook chapter. We found that our system promotes learning along 3 dimensions: memorizing scientific terminology, understanding a dynamic system, and transferring knowledge to a new situation.

References

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Ishii, H. et Ullmer, B. Tangible bits. Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, (1997), 234--241.
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Ishii, H., Ratti, C., Piper, B., Wang, Y., Biderman, A., et Ben-Joseph, E. Bringing Clay and Sand into Digital Design -- Continuous Tangible user Interfaces. BT Technology Journal 22, 4 (2004), 287--299.
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Kaltenbrunner, M. et Bencina, R. reacTIVision. Proceedings of the 1st international conference on Tangible and embedded interaction, (2007), 69.
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Piaget, J. The language and thought of the child. New York: Harcourt, 1928.
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    cover image ACM Conferences
    ITS '12: Proceedings of the 2012 ACM international conference on Interactive tabletops and surfaces
    November 2012
    430 pages
    ISBN:9781450312097
    DOI:10.1145/2396636
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

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    Association for Computing Machinery

    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    Published: 11 November 2012

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    Author Tags

    1. learning
    2. neuroscience
    3. tabletop
    4. tangible interface

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    ITS'12
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    ITS'12: Interactive Tabletops and Surfaces
    November 11 - 14, 2012
    Massachusetts, Cambridge, USA

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    ITS '12 Paper Acceptance Rate 24 of 63 submissions, 38%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 119 of 418 submissions, 28%

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