Shields Lab / Outreach
Neuroscience for classrooms
Hands-on activities for K-12 students, and two simulations you can run in class.
We have developed hands-on neuroscience activities for K-12 students on insects, smell, reflexes and nerve cells. Four are written up for teachers in Annals of Behavioral Neuroscience (2020). Dr. Shields also judges student science fairs, including the Hybrid STEM Fair at Oxon Hill High School in January 2026, and lab members spoke about student-led outreach at Sigma Xi IFoRE 2025 and will speak about near-peer mentoring at IFoRE 2026 in November.
Classroom models
We wrote these two simulations for class. Compounds X and Y are made up and the spike rates are only illustrative; neither model uses lab data.
Model 1. Two-choice repellency assay
Twenty-four flies are released evenly on both sides of the midline. One end of the tube holds the test compound on filter paper and the other holds only the solvent. After a few seconds the flies on each side are counted, and repellency is calculated as (C − T) / N, where C and T are the flies on the control and treated sides and N is all flies. The lab’s real assay is described under spotted-wing drosophila on the Research page.
| Run | Compound | Dose (µg) | Control | Treated | Repellency (%) |
|---|
Things to try
- Run the solvent alone three times. How evenly do the flies split, and why is it rarely exactly 12 and 12?
- Run compound X at several doses, at least twice each, and record the results.
- Estimate the RD50 of compound X, the dose that repels half of the flies. Then do the same for compound Y and decide which is the stronger repellent.
- Check your estimates against the model’s curves.
Dashed line: compound X. Solid line: compound Y. Your runs are plotted in red (circles for X, squares for Y). Single runs of 24 flies scatter around the curve, which is why each dose is run in replicate tubes.
Model 2. Tip recording from a taste sensillum
A spongy moth caterpillar’s taste sensillum holds four receptor cells. In a tip recording, one electrode touches the tip of the sensillum, delivers the stimulus and picks up the action potentials of all four cells. The cells are told apart by the size of their spikes. Choose a stimulus and record one second.
| Cell | Spikes |
|---|---|
| Record a second to fill this in. | |
Ticks above the trace mark which cell fired each spike, one row per cell in the order of the table: sugar, salt, deterrent, inositol. The pattern of responses follows Martin and Shields (2012a, 2012b) and Sanford et al. (2014): the deterrent cell responds to caffeine and DEET, and sucrose reduces its response to caffeine. The model is simplified: it puts four cell types in one sensillum. In the caterpillar the sugar cell is in the lateral sensillum, the inositol and deterrent cells are in the medial one, and the medial deterrent cell also responds weakly to salt.