PhUn Day: Third Times a Charm

Abstract

Physiology Understanding (PhUn) week consists of hands‐on activities and presentations, which incorporate the understanding of physiology through interactive fun. The University of Texas at El Paso’s Rehabilitation Sciences Program has hosted PhUn week in different schools throughout the El Paso community for a total of three years. Our first year in 2017, PhUn week was hosted at Hornedo Middle School and the activity reached seventh‐grade students (24). The following year in 2018, PhUn week was hosted at Tippin Elementary School and its whole second grade (96 students) and teachers (5) participated in the event. Although the American Physiological Society is no longer sponsoring PhUn week, we did not want to let this great community outreach project come to an end. Therefore, this year (2019) PhUn “day” was hosted at Kohlberg Elementary School in El Paso, Texas with the participation of its entire third‐grade class (80 students) and teachers (5). Since many of the students in the Rehabilitation Sciences program have participated in PhUn week in the past, we received great support in planning the event. We split up into teams and designed 5 new and exciting stations using electronic physiology data acquisition systems. These stations included reaction time, electromyography, and a stroke simulation which was designed to immobilize one side of the body and challenge cognition. We also had a working heart model showing the circulation of blood, and a sensory integration station in which students learned how the brain receives information from the 5 senses, organizes this information and responds appropriately. We used the Biopac MP40 system to conduct the reaction time and EMG stations. Each group of volunteers had one leader who participated in the previous years who was able to train the other students in the use of the Biopac MP40 system. We split the 80 students into groups of 16 and had them rotate every 20 minutes. The students, teachers, and other Kohlberg faculty, as well as UTEP students, had a lot of fun and learned about physiology at the same time. We could see the excitement and effect the event left on the young students as many left excited about science, which is the main goal of PhUn week. Overall, it was a great experience that required a lot of preparation and training but was worth the impact it had on the students involved.Support or Funding InformationResearch reported in this poster was supported by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences of the National Institutes of Health under linked Award Numbers RL5GM118969, TL4GM118971, and UL1GM118970. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.