Wellcome Trust has collected and designed lots of interesting biomedical resources. Among them there is an interesting ‘brain’ game called “the axon”. In this game you have to grow a neuron as long as possible. In the end, when you “lose” the game they tell you what kind of neuron you’ve grown. They then give you a link to Wikipedia with some explanation about that specific neuron.

You could ask students to play the game for homework and maybe tell them to play it ten times (you need to get the hang of it). Ask them to do some research about their neuron (not only on Wikipedia): description, picture, location, function,…) and tell them to put their information in a mindmap (MindMeister for example). The whole class can work in the same mindmap so they have to make sure they get a logical structure in their mindmap. This can be used afterwards as a study tool.

Katleen Vanden Driessche

This post is also available in: Romanian