Training Children to be like Mice

Greetings readers,

It's Craig here to add an entry describing the lab activity I hosted for Grace's school on Mercer's campus. The actual events took place on four days for two consecutive weeks. I had the 3rd graders in on Wed. Feb. 16, the 5th graders on Fri. Feb. 18, 1st and 2nd grades together on Wed. Feb. 23rd, and 4th grade on Fri. Feb. 25th. Now I did not have all the kids from those grades nor did I have them all day long. (I am not insane.) I did have them between 9:50 and 11:10 AM but I only hosted those kids involved in the REACH program. This is the elementary school's gifted and talented program.

The purpose of bringing them to my lab on campus was to let them participate in a lab exercise where they carried out a few activities related to their central nervous system. Specifically we were talking about balance and proprioception (body awareness) while they attempted to walk across balance beams of varying thinness. They recorded some limited data and then watched videos of mice doing the very same thing (walking across tight ropes of varying thinness). They also collected data from the mouse videos to compare to their own from balance beams. Students worked in groups of 2-3 and used stopwatches to time these crossing events but they also counted the frequency of arm waving (or tail waving in the case of the mice). These data were then entered into some pre-designed spreadsheets where graphs would fill in with their data for easy comparison. Ideally they would see some sort of relationship between branch thinness and slower crossing speeds and increased arm waving in both themselves and mice. Afterwards we talked about the human nervous system and proprioception and how mice have these same attributes. The lab was fun to do and it involved several of my undergraduate students. They were great and very helpful managing the kids on all the beams and computers. Grace was there too in the 1st and 2nd grade group. On that day Ellen also assisted (thanks hon).

One funny story... in the 1st and 2nd grade crowd this little boy immediately put his hand in the air as I began my introductory spiel. He was eager to say something but I was eager to get started so I waited until I had finished before calling on him. He then said "You know you look a lot like Bill Nye." Of course everyone started laughing, including my undergrads who immediately began downloading pictures of Bill Nye onto the lab computers as their new wallpaper. For those of you who don't know, Bill Nye is the Science Guy that all kids know from educational films and television. He is tall, skinny, and dorky, wears a lab coat and a bow tie. For the record I look nothing like Bill Nye. I don't wear bow ties and I don't wear a lab coat unless I am dissecting things. I am kind of dorky though, especially when I get started talking about animals that climb (like my specially trained lab mice). Here are some pictures.