Dive Summary:
- A Harvard professor is using the crowd-funding site Kickstarter to run a MOOC and buy special devices that help ordinary people monitor the brains of invertebrates.
- The money raised would help provide students with a unit called a SpikerBox, which allows the user to monitor the neurons of a live animal.
- The idea is that the SpikerBox will let students use cockroaches and worms to conduct home experiments — experiments that, Cox is careful to note, follow strict ethical guidelines.
From the article:
... “The only ‘strings’ attached are that we’ll ask students to contribute back what they find (ideally a video of them performing experiments),” Cox wrote in an email. “We also hope to give some fraction of the SpikerBoxes to science teachers who are taking our course, so that they can share with their students over multiple years. ...