High School Optogenetics Workshop Protocol v1

Abstract

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.