Adapting a Neural Engineering Summer Camp for High School Students to a Fully Online Experience

The COVID-19 pandemic and its resulting health and safety concerns caused the cancellation of many engineering education opportunities for high school students. To expose high school students to the field of neural engineering and encourage them to pursue academic pathways in biomedical engineering, the Center for Neurotechnology (CNT) at the University of Washington converted an in-person summer camp to a fully online program (Virtual REACH Program, VRP) offering both synchronous and asynchronous resources. The VRP is a five-day online program that focuses on a different daily theme (neuroscience, brain-computer interfaces, electrical stimulation, neuroethics, career/academic pathways). Each day, the VRP starts with a live videoconference meeting (lecture and interactive discussion) with a CNT faculty member. The online lectures are supported by at-home learning resources (e.g., text, videos, activities, quizzes) embedded within a digital book created using the Pressbook platform. An online bulletin board (Padlet) is also used by students to share artifacts and build community. Program evaluation will be conducted by an external evaluator. A summative survey will collect information on participants’ experiences in the VRP and will help inform future iterations of the program. Although significant time was required to create a digital book, the VRP will reach a larger audience than the prior in-person program and resulted in the creation of learning tools that can be used in the future.