Using BCIs for EdTech: TechGirl 2023
Back in May 2023, on study leave for my GCSEs one day, I refreshed my mail, expecting the same-old junk mail. To my surprise, I was greeted with
“Hi Neha,
We are thrilled to inform you that you have been selected as a winner of the 2023 TechGirl Competition! Your innovative idea on how technology can be used to improve schools and education truly stood out amongst the submissions, and we are excited to see the impact it will have in the future.”
I had just won the award of TechGirl 2023.
After winning, I was invited to Abbey Studios (yes- the Abbey studios across the famous crosswalk that celebrities like the Beatles have walked across) to receive my award.
Me (taken from a different angle for road safety purposes):
The Beatles:
This was followed by confidence training from Bridgid Nzekwu, an award-winning media trainer and communications coach who has worked with BBC and ITV.
I also had the opportunity to be mentored by a leading woman in technology. My assigned mentor was Marie Orpen, the previous CDO of The Guide Dogs for the Blind Association, and our mentoring sessions have been going amazingly, with Marie allowing me to set goals as SMART objectives, so I can be intentional about what I would like to achieve.
After this, I was presented with my award within the Abbey Studios.
We were then given the opportunity to film a video where we talked about our idea and future plans for our life
Some articles on the event:
Evening Standard: https://lnkd.in/eiT4r9FF
Meet the Leader: https://lnkd.in/eZ3brha7
To learn more about this event, you can look at this page: https://lnkd.in/eg-VSirN
I owe this fantastic experience to HotTopics, who I truly appreciate for giving me this opportunity, as it gave me the confidence to further my interests in this field. It’s opportunities like these that not only help bridge the gender gap in technology, but allow young minds to be inspired to follow their dreams.
My winning essay:
Have you heard Einstein’s infamous quote? “Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid”. I have to admit, I don’t agree with this quote- I believe in hard work over talent and hence, to me, I wouldn’t say that everyone is a “genius”, perhaps rather a “hard-worker”. Nevertheless, the quote has some truth to it; everyone can be highly intelligent if they are in the right environment and oftentimes, the school system forces students to fit into theirs. The truth is, our brains are all so different that subjecting us all to 5 hours of lessons everyday may not really be the best way for all of our brains to develop. For some yes, but for many not. In Carol Dweck’s book “Mindset”, she highlights the importance of figuring out what your current mindset is and encourages the reader to foster an environment in which people can optimise their progress in life by being provided the correct environment.
A relatively new technology is electroencephalography (EEG)-based BCI systems and my idea is to use these to the benefit of the classroom.
But first, why the classroom? There is so much that the school curriculum just does not teach that children and teenagers might want to learn about. The main reason I chose to target classrooms is because students have to complete the homework and exams that take place, but outside of the classroom, they can choose to learn however they want, whether that be through videos or websites, there are myriad resources on the internet. Moreover, if I focus on the classroom, I can have a big audience, since every child under 16 in the UK should legally be learning at school. Thus, I can make the biggest impact. Personally, I believe that it is essentially useless to live a life in which I do not make an impact, hence it is essential that I help as many people as possible. This is also the reason I was so excited to participate in the Techgirls 2023 challenge. Also, many parents may believe that it is best for their children to play outside of school hours and students may look to cheat out of the system if this was assigned as extra work. For this reason, I choose to implement my idea in the school classroom within school hours.
I wish to use these BCIs to measure when a student is paying attention. I plan to provide numerical values as an indicator of how focussed a student is at the moment, as the values are often provided as a line graph, so I would take the amplitude of the graph at a certain point, round it to the nearest integer and the computer would input this number into a table of student by attention span. This will then be conditionally formatted, where those with an attention span lower than a certain number would be red, then those with a higher attention span would be presented as orange and those higher would be formatted as a green cell in the table. In real time, every 2 minutes, a report of the whole class’s average attention is provided to the teacher, as well as the individual attention. This is so that the teacher can easily read the table and gauge how the class is doing, so it will not disrupt the flow of the class too much. It is important here that the teacher has it in their best interests to not punish students, but rather, try another way of teaching to switch the repetitive process of sitting in a classroom listening to a teacher endlessly talking to a fun, different learning experience.
I also plan to record the time period that a student pays attention and at the end of each day, the least amount of time and most amount of time in minutes and seconds will be provided for the teacher. An AI system would then sort the students out in terms of their attention span, so students with short attention spans study together. By doing this, they can be pushed to focus for longer periods of time, which will eventually lead to a better working environment as they will only be pushed to focus for 30 minutes, which is a healthy time of focus. After every 30 minutes, they will be provided with a fun recap game of the past 30 minutes, which the AI system will also create if the teacher provides the lesson script for the day to the system. Here, they will play this for 5 minutes with less focus and more relaxation. On the other hand, students with longer attention spans can learn at an average pace throughout the lesson for 50 minutes and for the last 10 minutes, they will all complete a small presentation on the lesson recap, in whatever form they think they want to develop, which they will submit to an AI system. This AI system would analyse the text and provide feedback to the student of what they missed and provide the number of points that the student checked off to the teacher as well as a kind of rewards system to encourage students to do better in this section of their lessons.
The key thing about my idea to make it work is that it is not based on punishments. There will be no punishments for focussing less, rather, activities will just be adapted to make it easier to focus in the long run.
Why focus? It is a well-known fact that focus increases productivity massively, Productivity is key for any career that humans choose to go forward with and careers are all a necessity for students to earn money in the future. Therefore, by adopting this idea, we are building a generation of people who know that they can learn. Personally, I used to have a friend who had ADHD and had an extremely hard time focussing. Lessons were hard to get through for her and the school had only so much that they could do. What inspired me though, most recently, was my Chemistry teacher. She has decided to leave the school to pursue her own business that helps neurodivergent children in their school life. She opened up to us about the struggles of having to learn so much about how to develop learning in neurodivergent people, as the mother of two neurodivergent children, and I believe it should never have to be that hard for a parent. Nevertheless, I think that this needs to be addressed, especially with the rise of shortening attention spans, due to the rise of Tiktok in Generation Z and MZ and its quick-moving nature, as well as the fast-moving nature of children’s shows like Cocomelon.
To do this, first, wear EEG sensors, which are EEG electrodes, essentially small metal discs, on your head. Equip them with conductive gel and tape them to your head. Two should be placed on your forehead, which will record these EEG waves that your brain is emitting. The other two electrodes will be placed as one behind each ear. These electrodes are a control to compare the other two electrodes to.These electrodes pick up and record the electrical activity which is currently going on in your brain, which lets out waves. I chose to use EEGs to detect brain waves over EMGs to detect muscle movement or ECGs to identify information about the heart. With this algorithm, I would like to detect alpha and beta waves. The process begins by performing EEG scans.
When we think, the neurons in our brain send electrical impulses through synapses between the neurons. This releases different signals. Alpha and beta waves have a certain hertz threshold. I chose to detect alpha and beta waves because those allow me to identify when someone is focussing or not. Additionally, I would use frequency (FFT) bins and fast fourier transforms to help me achieve this. Both of these create an output from the inputs of these waves.
So join me in creating a better future for our students. After all, they are all “geniuses”- this technology will just help them unlock that.
Thanks for reading. If you are interested or have any questions, please email me at neha.adapala@gmail.com
Feel free to follow me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/neha-adapala-7b2a56231/
