To start the conversation around neurobiology, brain structures, and their roles, years ago1 I developed a scenario wherein students had to think-through an hypothetical impending brain surgery and the preoperative neurological evaluation commonly done between a patient and a clinical neuropsychologist. I cribbed together the worksheet attached.
About ten years later, I transferred the questions to a Google Form and revised them a bit.
I’d had an idea for how I might change this activity, but I didn’t have the skills or a few of the parts (like space to host a webpage (for free)). But I’d recently figured out how to use my GitHub account from 2012 to do the later, and Claude has the former. So this weekend, I built a brain surgery decision simulation, and put it in GitHub Pages.
https://eecastro.github.io/brain-surgery-decision-sim/
Students can work through it, pause until the whole class is ready, enter the code incision, and see their results.
Their results are coded, which I’ll ask for in a simple, anonymous Google Form. From there I copy the column with the codes, and paste them into https://eecastro.github.io/brain-surgery-decision-sim/results.html
You can click ‘Try with sample data’ to see what the class dashboard shows for the ensuing conversation.
All of the code is available for reuse with a Creative Commons license at https://github.com/eecastro/brain-surgery-decision-sim.
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A 2002 graduate needed brain surgery early in her undergrad years, and we kept in touch. I based the scenario off her experiences, and even showed her pictures to students for a decade after. ↩︎