National Biomechanics Day Event Report #1 - Asal Aflatounian & Alexandra Lynch

9/3/2024 3:03 pm

This blog is the first entry into a series about award winners from the Women in Biomechanics Outreach Grant for National Biomechanics Day events. Each awardee submitted a summary of their event, which has been condensed for brevity and clarity.

 

One thing that stands out from the NBD event put on by Asal Aflatounian and Alexandra Lynch is accessibility. Their mission is to better acquaint high school students in Montana with biomechanics, and they have been successfully implementing National Biomechanics Day events since 2018! Unfortunately, Montana is pretty big, meaning their Bozeman location is not easy to get to for all students. So, this year, they are piloting additional virtual activities/lab tours to ensure that students who may not be able to participate on campus at Montana State University will still be able to learn more about biomechanics.

 

The event they hosted this year had several exciting stations, including a motion capture system, muscle activation (via an introduction to surface EMG), learning about muscle force-length-velocity relationship basics, a prosthetic hand, and – a crowd favorite – balance assessment while using VR glasses. The addition of the VR glasses was made possible by the IWB grant, and helped show the students how perturbations in visual cues affected their balance. The event also included discussions with undergraduate and graduate biomechanics students to talk about possible career paths and provide advice.

 

The attendees included 14 girls and 11 boys, which met an exciting goal of including a majority girls in the program! The organizers reported “lots of excitement, smiles, questions, and enthusiasm for the activities and seeing the biomechanics world.” This positive feedback will be taken into consideration as they work towards increasing the accessibility of their events in the future, and potentially providing a framework for other virtual National Biomechanics Day events hosted elsewhere.

 

Their advice for planning your own National Biomechanics Day event? “Planning ahead is really important and goes a long way! Working out the details for high school groups to attend takes time, so plan ahead for NBD! Keeping the activities simple and focused on itneraction and discussion has been a good strategy for us. Ultimately bringing a lot of positive energy helps to foster a really fun environment for everyone!”

 

Take a look at some of the awesome pictures from their event below!