The festival today was great fun! It was incredibly engaging to meet so many people so interested in our work and what we had to say. The locale was great, there were so many people and I feel like I got a clearer understanding of the function and importance of the Dopamine through explaining it to other people. I also realized how difficult it is to strike a balance between an educational, interactive and child friendly presentation. Communicating the structure, function and effects of Dopamine to children was fun and challenging. To explain to adults the molecular structure of dopamine and how the number of D1, D2, D3 and D4 receptors impact disorders like ADHD, Parkinsons and Schizophrenia was challenging in itself. The journey from tyrosine to DOPA to dopamine, and onwards to the brain receptors and the spinal chord is complicated and difficult to condense into a short 2-3 minute conversation, and trying to explain this to the kids was more difficult than I anticipated. Both Lisa and I had very difficult concepts to explain, and while our art projects aided our explanation it was still challenging to be scientifically accurate and not oversimplify. I will definitely try to make my presentation more clear and succinct for Wednesday, but I think Ruhlman might be easier since the audience will be in the same age group and have some understanding of scientific principles. However, the molecule structure keychains I had made were popular both with kids (who probably liked the beads) and adults, and I felt like I had many engaging conversations with all the inquisitive people who came up to our table! I managed to save a few and will display them at Ruhlman and demonstrate how to make them during our presentation.
I also told a lot of people to go check out our exhibition up by Central Square, so hopefully some of the people will go learn more about our work!
Very interesting. I think it would be helpful to also tell people the function of dopamine and rewards. People are bound to be interested in this since dopamine is the reason why anything makes you happy such as food or love.
I completely agree! I really liked the fact that I had to find new ways to explain the scientific concepts in order for the children to understand. I think that this provided a funner aspect to all our projects. In addition, it was really nice to see that children were interested in the scientific facts and the projects that we presented.