Meet Your Brain

The human brain is the most complex system in the universe. This three-pound organ is responsible for interpreting the world around us and for guiding our movements, behaviors, and emotions.
Learning about our brains and understanding the power of our cognitive sides will help us to understand our biases, stereotypes, and prejudices which affect our daily decisions about ourselves and the world around us.
Learning about the brain and its working process will help kids to reprogram their brains and change their perspectives so that they can better solve complex problems.

WORKSHOPS
​
The "Meet Your Brain" Design-Science workshops are part of our Heart Brain Kid program. The goal of these workshops is to introduce the human body's complex systems and to show kids how the nervous system is interconnected with other systems. The workshops have been developed along with the "Meet Your Brain" book, which uses playful 3D tools to allow kids to examine the brain.

The workshop structure has been designed with two themes:
1) Hardware: the different parts of the human brain and their functions.
2) Process: the emotional and cognitive work of the brain, intelligence, and decision-making.

The workshop is divided into four activities. Each activity is at a different scale, but similar logic helps to foster interactions between kids. Group activities and individual explorations can all be initiated concurrently. Heart Brain System Studio's pop-up space is created using recycled cardboard discarded by retailers based in the Rochester, NY area.
​Teaching children to adopt systems thinking and to embrace empathy is an investment that has lifelong benefits. It helps kids to understand social networks, the connectivity of the world, the interconnectivity and complexity of problems, and how we can pursue solutions on a wide scale. This approach also helps kids to understand the reasons behind changes and prepares them to be ready for changes.

We all live in a very complex system but (for the past several hundred years) the human-made linear system has grown to dominate our daily lives, including everything from our educational institutions to our grocery shopping and media. This linearity is limiting. Instead of seeing and understanding the whole and its interconnections, we just see the parts which are highlighted by the linear system.
​
​
Adopting system thinking in education systems and daily life helps children to develop holistic and creative mindsets for examining and solving complex problems.

System thinking encourages children to see problems from many different perspectives, to understand the meaning of their experiences in relation to the world around them, and pushes them to take risks and work to create positive change.