Although the field of neurotechnology is predicted to grow at a tremendous rate and become a part of our everyday lives, we have not witnessed an equivalent growth rate in neuroscience education at the high school level. This represents a missed opportunity to have an educated public that understands the application and benefits of these technologies, as well as educated students who are able to fill the predicted demand in neurotechnology jobs.There exists a need for hands-on, active learning-based approaches for demonstrating neurotechnology and neuroscience principles to high school students. Here, we describe how to build a low-cost assay and how to run a high school workshop to introduce students to a particular neurotechnology: optogenetics. In the workshop, students use light to activate different neurons in the nervous system of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster and use their own cell phone to capture and annotate the behaviors driven by each type of neuron.Our workshop can be adopted in outreach programs to provide a low-cost hands-on learning tool to demonstrate optogenetics and neuroscience concepts to high school classrooms. Additionally, the optogenetics assay may be adopted by resource limited labs looking to perform optogenetics experiments.

Although neurotechnology careers are on the rise, and neuroscience curriculums have significantly grown at the undergraduate and graduate levels, increasing neuroscience and neurotechnology exposure in high school curricula has been an ongoing challenge. This is due, in part, to difficulties in converting cutting-edge neuroscience research into hands-on activities that are accessible for high school students and affordable for high school educators. Here, we describe and characterize a low-cost, easy-to-construct device to enable students to record rapid Drosophila melanogaster (fruit fly) behaviors during optogenetics experiments. The device is generated from inexpensive Arduino kits and utilizes a smartphone for video capture, making it easy to adopt in a standard biology laboratory. We validate this device is capable of replicating optogenetics experiments performed with more sophisticated setups at leading universities and institutes. We incorporate the device into a high school neuroengineering summer workshop. We find student participation in the workshop significantly enhances their understanding of key neuroscience and neurotechnology concepts, demonstrating how this device can be utilized in high school settings and undergraduate research laboratories seeking low-cost alternatives.

Although the field of neurotechnology is predicted to grow at a tremendous rate and become a part of our everyday lives, we have not witnessed an equivalent growth rate in neuroscience education at the high school level. This represents a missed opportunity to have an educated public that understands the application and benefits of these technologies, as well as educated students who are able to fill the predicted demand in neurotechnology jobs.There exists a need for hands-on, active learning-based approaches for demonstrating neurotechnology and neuroscience principles to high school students. Here, we describe how to build a low-cost assay and how to run a high school workshop to introduce students to a particular neurotechnology: optogenetics. In the workshop, students use light to activate different neurons in the nervous system of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster and use their own cell phone to capture and annotate the behaviors driven by each type of neuron.Our workshop can be adopted in outreach programs to provide a low-cost hands-on learning tool to demonstrate optogenetics and neuroscience concepts to high school classrooms. Additionally, the optogenetics assay may be adopted by resource limited labs looking to perform optogenetics experiments.