Interactive Curriculum Based on Models of Mind & Brain

What does it mean for curriculum to be interactive? It encourages student engagement and active participation in both individual and group work. It offers teachers a coherent set of materials to choose from that can enhance their classes. It is the product of on-going development and continuous improvement based on research and feedback from the field. This paper will introduce work in progress from the Center for Excellence in Education, Science, and Technology (CELEST), an NSF Science of Learning Center. Among its many goals, CELEST is developing a unique educational curriculum, an interactive curriculum based upon models of mind and brain. Teachers, administrators, and governments are naturally concerned with how students learn. Students are greatly concerned about how minds work, including how to learn. CELEST aims to introduce curricula that not only meet current U.S. standards in mathematics, science, and psychology but also influence plans to improve those standards. Software and support materials are in development and available at http://cns.bu.edu/celest/private/. Interested parties are invited to contact the author for access.

BrainMaps.org - Interactive High-Resolution Digital Brain Atlases and Virtual Microscopy

BrainMaps.org is an interactive high-resolution digital brain atlas and virtual microscope that is based on over 20 million megapixels of scanned images of serial sections of both primate and non-primate brains and that is integrated with a high-speed database for querying and retrieving data about brain structure and function over the internet. Complete brain datasets for various species, including Homo sapiens, Macaca mulatta, Chlorocebus aethiops, Felis catus, Mus musculus, Rattus norvegicus, and Tyto alba, are accessible online. The methods and tools we describe are useful for both research and teaching, and can be replicated by labs seeking to increase accessibility and sharing of neuroanatomical data. These tools offer the possibility of visualizing and exploring completely digitized sections of brains at a sub-neuronal level, and can facilitate large-scale connectional tracing, histochemical and stereological analyses.