OHBM Kids Live Review: What we can learn from 2023 event organizers
Author: Fernanda H. P. de Moraes, Kangjoo Lee, and Julia W. Y. Kam
Editors: Simon Steinkamp, Yohan Yee, Kevin Sitek, Elisa Guma
Learn about the 2023 OHBM Kids Live Review - a series interactive events engaging children with neuroscience
The 2023 OHBM Kids Live Review was the largest event since its first edition in 2021. What initially began as an opportunity for kids to review a manuscript specifically written for kids (e.g. 8–14 years old) in front of a live audience ultimately reached the broader goal of encouraging kids to pursue science while engaging in scientific outreach with a non-standard audience for researchers. In this one-hour event, a member of OHBM gives a short scientific research presentation in their native language, followed by a live Q&A session, in which children can freely ask questions about the presentation, fundamentals of neuroscience, or scientific careers. Last year’s event reached more than 1000 children around the world across 16 live sessions in 11 languages (English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Traditional and Simplified Mandarin, Portuguese, and Spanish). This year (2024), we officially renamed this series of events as the “Brain Mappers of Tomorrow” (BMT).
Dr. Kangjoo Lee, the lead of the 2023 initiative and the 2024 chair of the OHBM Diversity and Inclusivity Committee (DIC), interviewed three local event organizers of hugely successful events. The interview aims to help future organizers of the event, to understand what worked and what could be improved, and what the advantages are of presenting their work in this format. First, we interviewed Flavie Detcheverry, who organized the in-person event during the OHBM Annual Meeting 2023 in Montréal, Canada. Due to the city's bilingual status, the event was held in both French and English. For this event, we collaborated with the journal Frontiers for Young Minds (FYM), whose target audience is kids and adolescents: Several young reviewers provided critical feedback for the presenters who submitted their manuscript for publication at this journal. We also interviewed Dr. Isotta Rigoni, who held two live events in schools in Italy, the organizer's homeland. Finally, Dr. Victor Hugo Souza organized a live event for more than 500 kids in Brazil, with multiple schools engaging remotely with the organizers, with a presentation about the brain and the movements followed by Q&A.
Figure 1. The OHBM Kids Live Review organizers interviewed: (left) Flavie Detcheverry, who presented at the in-person French/English session during the OHBM Annual Meeting 2023; (middle) Dr. Isotta Rigoni, co-organizer and co-presenter for the in-person Italian session; and (right) Dr. Victor Hugo Souza, one of the presenters/organizers for the remote Portuguese sessions.
Interviews with Successful BMT Event Organizers
Despite the hard work necessary to make each event happen, the importance of participating in science communication and sharing knowledge was the key motivator for Flavie, Isotta, and Victor. As pointed out by Victor:
"The kids raised fundamental questions that we usually take for granted in our routine work where we tend to focus too much on very specific topics, such as a particular neuron type or protein present in a single cellular mechanism. However, kids are surprisingly interested in discussing higher-level and even more difficult topics such as consciousness, death, memory, and learning. In the end, talking about the brain with the kids makes you look at science from a broader perspective."
And by Isotta:
"[…] to stimulate curiosity and to answer weird questions they might have about science. And then, of course, after having left Italy many years ago, it's really nice to do this with Italian students! After graduating from university, I have always worked abroad, and now, to have the opportunity to go back to my country (and even to villages nearby my hometown) and propose this program is finally the chance to 'give something back' […]"
Practicing communication skills for an extraordinary audience was highlighted as one of the main gains of organizing a live event. As Isotta mentioned:
“Most of all, this experience gives you the opportunity to reflect on how to tailor your presentation for a specific audience. This is crucial for early career researchers because we don't always interact with the same people: sometimes we talk to research committees who don't know anything about our field, so we need to adjust to that. There are times we want to leave academia for industry where soft skills are highly valued, and then we need to tailor our presentation again. We're talking about completely different audiences, so preparing for the OHBM Kids Review definitely gives you the opportunity to think about how to present your topic from a different perspective […]”
Flavie also highlighted soft skills. In her own words:
"I think this experience helped me with writing for a general audience, as well as organization, and collaboration because we were like a whole team."
Step-by-Step Description of How to Organize a BMT Event
There are multiple ways to host a successful live Brain Mappers of Tomorrow event (see Table 1).The Organization often requires two or three months of preparation (e.g. creating a 2-3 minute trailer video, webpage, flyers, presentation materials, materials for additional activities, and a Frontiers for Young Minds manuscript if applicable), recruitment (e.g. contacting schools and teachers, advertising, determining date, time, and space of the live event) before the live event. The first step is to register on the OHBM-DIC website with at least one presenter, two moderators, and the proposed event topic. The registration is followed by producing materials to be included in the website disclosure and for audience outreach. Following this, the host has to decide when the event will occur: during the OHBM annual meeting or before the Annual Meeting. Finally, the organizers present the proposed topic on the event day and organize a Q&A session with the young audience. The OHBM DIC holds an orientation session for local organizers to help understand the process, provides various online and graphical resources which can be adapted and modified to meet unique needs from each team, and oversees and supports the preparation process throughout this period. In addition, the OHBM DIC uses a lot of online and social media resources to ensure that the efforts and contributions of local event organizers are appreciated and recognized by the general OHBM memberships.
Identifying and Overcoming Challenges with Organizing a BMT Event
Organizing a BMT event can be a time-demanding and effortful process, but it is all worth it in the end. Our previous organizers shared the main challenges they faced.
The OHBM-DIC will provide resources to help organizers with their presentation, outreach material, and any other challenges they may face during this process. As mentioned in the interviews, having an official webpage within the OHBM-DIC website was helpful for parents and teachers to verify that the event was official; it was shared with parents, teachers, and school managers and within the OHBM community. Building trust between all parties involved (organizers, schools, and parents) is usually the first challenge faced by an organizer. Each session had its own webpage with an abstract of the presentation, a description of the organization team, a short trailer video with subtitles, and the session details in both their native language and English. Moreover, OHBM-DIC also offers registration forms that organizers can use to organize and communicate with the attendees.
An important point to consider when organizing the event is to have the most effective way to contact schools, which varies depending on the context and environment. For example, Isotta reached out to people she knew, whereas Victor contacted the school's managers. They both worked actively to create and maintain an interest in the school to do this extracurricular activity. A piece of common advice was to let the school manager decide where, at what time, and which classes would participate, freeing the organizers from additional administrative challenges. Letting the school manage the event further helps to improve attendance and allows them to organize the activity so that it "synchroniz[es] with the school schedule and makes that as a part of school activities". Flavie’s session was during the OHBM Annual Meeting, so she needed to ensure kids would come to the venue with their caregivers. They achieved this by contacting schools in Montréal, parents in town they knew, and the parents at the OHBM Meeting.
Victor, whose event targeted larger groups of kids than Isotta’s faced a different challenge: how to optimize the time to ensure the kids could ask their questions. To manage the presentation time, Victor sent a Google Form to the school managers in advance, open for questions from the kids, so they could prepare and select the most common/interesting ones to include in the presentation material. We believe this approach strengthens the bond between the kids and the presenter, especially if the presenters are doing a remote session as Victor and his colleagues.
| French/English session | Portuguese session | Italian session II | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Organizers | Presenter: Flavie Detcheverry Moderators: Sneha Senthil, Sridar Narayanan, AmanPreet Badhwar |
Presenter: Victor Hugo Souza Moderators: Maíra Pinto, Renan Matsuda |
Two members presented and moderated together: Isotta Rigoni and Irene Balboni |
| Date/time/location | In-person during the OHBM Annual Meeting (July 2023) in Montreál, Canada | Online (June 2023), each class in Brazil had its own access. | In-person (June 2023), Italy. |
| Participant | Most of the participants attended with their parents, who were OHBM participants. | More than 550 participants in approximately ten schools participated. The schools were distributed across many cities, mainly in Patrocinio, MG, and Uberlândia, SP (Brazil). | More than 80 kids from two grades, 8-9 years old and 9-10 years old, who were distributed across five classes from 2 schools (Edmondo de Amicis) in two cities in Italy. |
| Program organization | 1-hour live event
|
1.5-hour live event
|
2 hours live event
|
| FYM Journal Submission | Yes (see published article) | No | No |
| Webpage | link | link | link |
Next to the organization, Isotta and Victor faced another challenge: How to keep the event interesting and engaging enough, to keep their young audiences’ focus and attention? To overcome these difficulties, Isotta opted to include outdoor activities with games, and Victor included the anticipated questions from the students in the presentation.
Organizing a BMT event can be a time-demanding and effortful process, but it is all worth it in the end: The 2023 OHBM Kids Live Review was hugely successful based on the number of attendees around the world. And we hope to continue this for 2024 and beyond. Regardless of how you want to organize your event, either by innovating with an activity or by following the established protocol, you can count on the OHBM-DIC team to help you organize and prepare for this meaningful event.