Episode Transcript
[00:00:10] Speaker A: This is the owlcast, the official podcast of ACS Athens.
Listen to the exciting story of the American community schools of Athens.
Check out what drives all the members of our international community of learners as we create the education of the future.
Here's John Papadakis.
[00:00:51] Speaker B: Today's episode of outkast presents an exciting highlight from the IB Global Conference held in Budapest, Hungary earlier this fall. This year's theme, Inspiring Realizing Potential set the stage for a groundbreaking presentation by the Intersection Club, a collaborative ACS Athens initiative where IB Biology and psychology meet in a milestone achievement. Our students projects were selected to be presented as a featured breakout session amidst hundreds of global submissions. Join us as our innovative students and their teacher advisors, Dr. Lina Prodromidi and Angela Jamos Fakidi talk about this experience, insights and student aspirations.
Founded over five years ago by our two educators, the Intersection Club celebrates the synthesis of biology and psychology under the lens of interdisciplinary learning with neuroscience and epigenetics, among other themes. The club empowers students to explore seemingly disconnected topics such as the brain's physiological processes and human behavior. In this episode, you'll hear firsthand about their passion for merging disciplines, the projects they designed, and their unique contributions to the IB community.
Listen to the behind the scenes account of the students inventive projects showcased at the conference. From studying the links between nutrition and mental health with a mind fuel bar to exploring sensory perception through creative experiments, these projects highlight the Club's commitment to hands on impactful learning.
Each project illuminates the intricate ties between biological mechanisms and psychological responses, offering participants practical applications that extend far beyond the classroom. The episode also captures the students reflections on their learning journey, including their growing appreciation for interdisciplinary studies and the global recognition of their work. Their enthusiasm is contagious as they share how this experience influenced their future aspirations with several aiming to pursue fields like neuropsychology, biomedical engineering and art therapy. The opportunity to showcase their projects at a global platform not only validated their efforts but also inspired educators worldwide with innovative teaching methods. You'll also hear from the teacher advisors who nurtured this exceptional initiative. They discussed the importance of breaking down barriers between disciplines and fostering dynamic student driven learning experiences. Stay tuned to discover how these students and educators are shaping the future of IB education by demonstrating the transformative power of interdisciplinary collaboration.
[00:03:49] Speaker C: Thank you for having us here. We are the Intersection Team or representatives of the Intersection Team or a club where biology meets psychology and we are here today with Shaya. Shaya was with Avra and they were working on the emotion regulation Station.
We're also here with Rita. Rita was working on the food for Thought Corner.
Ileana is here, and she was working with Ileana and Eva on the behavioral genetics station.
And we're also here with Michaela, who was with Urania, and they were working on the sensory perception station. Dr. Prodromidi is here with us. And we are the co advisors of the Intersection Club, where biology meets psychology.
[00:04:45] Speaker B: Now, we had this discussion, I believe, last year. You say two years ago, but I say last year.
My question is, for someone who doesn't know what the Intersection Club is, we're talking about two different disciplines and you invited students, IB students to get into this club. So what is this club? What is it all about?
[00:05:08] Speaker D: Okay, hello from me as well, and welcome to everyone in this podcast. The Intersection Club was founded over five years ago by Ms. Jamos Fakidis and myself when we were just discussing informally about our students and about our two IB subjects, which we found that have many common threads and many common targets. So we thought of doing this in a more official way and establishing this clap. It's not exclusive to the ib, however, it is dominated by our IB students because we both teach them. And it is about bridging two disciplines under the umbrella of science, really, and with a focus on the nervous system, the brain. Neuroscience is a very common thread of ours. Epigenetics is another common thread of ours. And that was the focus of the work that our students really decided to do, having the brain as the main body organ and how it functions and can determine behavior and many other things that the students will talk about.
[00:06:18] Speaker B: So you mentioned that there are many common threads. Okay. And that the students chose these threads, the specific threads. You mentioned epigenetics, you mentioned the brain, neuroscience. What are the threads exist that maybe not evident? I mean, the brain and psychology. Yeah, it's there. I mean, you can understand, I don't know the term epigenetics or people don't understand what that means. What are the threads? Are there? Maybe the students might want to chime in on this one.
[00:06:49] Speaker C: Sure.
[00:06:49] Speaker D: We were talking about the curriculum threads mainly, so I will let the students now tell us what they think is common between the two.
[00:06:56] Speaker C: And you can think about your station. Think about the specific station that you worked on. What were the connections that you identified, let's say, between biology and psychology as you were trying to engage participants?
[00:07:10] Speaker B: When you say stations, you mean your.
[00:07:11] Speaker C: Projects, the projects that they were involved in? Yeah.
[00:07:14] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:07:16] Speaker E: So my name is Rita and I had the food for thought Station. And basically my station was how some nutrients affect your mental health and affect the brain, the neurology of it. For example, I found that magnesium relates to reduced anxiety. So I created this healthy bar. I presented this store bought bar and then I connected it, I showed the bar and I explained. So every time we go to the supermarket, we have to look at the ingredients, we have to look at all the products, detail of the bar. And then I created my own healthy bar. I called it the Mind Fuel bar. And we found many ingredients, how they can increase your brain health and how they increase your mental health. So basically I found what a big connection what we eat has to our brain. And most of us have worked in this club and have been a part of this club, didn't know what a big role food has on our brain and our mental health. And it was a really cool experience that we got to find out. And now we have applied this in our daily lives. And I was honored to present this in the Athens Science Festival.
[00:08:34] Speaker B: So if you think yourself before that particular project, before developing the bar, would you say from the scale from 1 to 10, how much more involved you are right now in looking into the ingredients, in looking what you're eating, in looking what you're buying?
[00:08:53] Speaker E: Probably a nine.
[00:08:54] Speaker B: Probably a nine.
[00:08:55] Speaker E: Yeah.
[00:08:55] Speaker B: Which means that nine times, nine more times in your mind, you thinking right now.
[00:09:01] Speaker E: Yeah, definitely.
[00:09:02] Speaker B: Of these things. Do you also engage in discussions with other people?
[00:09:05] Speaker E: Yes, yes, yes. After this presentation, actually, I've told many of my friends and family and classmates and it's a very cool experience that we got to see and.
[00:09:16] Speaker B: Okay, and what is their reaction? What do you tell them these days?
[00:09:20] Speaker E: Well, they had no idea that the food actually has an impact on our brain health. They had no idea that these two things are connected.
And it was really cool to see their reactions and see how much knowledge not only I gained, but also they gained from this. And it was a really cool experience because I also had. I had some idea because I took both IB Psychology and IB Biology last year, but I had no idea what a big connection it has, not only on our mental health, but also on our physical health and on our health of our brain and the neurology behind it, which is why I want to study neuropsychology right now. So.
[00:09:56] Speaker B: Excellent, you answered my next question. So you're going to neuropsychology.
[00:10:00] Speaker E: Neuropsychology, yeah.
[00:10:01] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:10:02] Speaker D: Can I just clarify that what the students are telling us is the work that they did last year for the Athens Science Festival, which was also represented by Ms. Jamos Fakidis and myself in the recent IB Global Conference where we couldn't take the students with us because it's an adult only conference. However, we found a way to kind of have them digitally with us because they recorded their activities and everything they worked on. And our videos were embedded in our presentation. And as Angela says, this was the highlight of our workshop. It was the students work highlighting all these bridges between biology and psychology.
[00:10:39] Speaker B: We're going to talk about the conference in more detail. Let's hear about the other stations, the other projects of the students.
[00:10:46] Speaker F: I think for me, another thread was basically we studied addiction through both biology and psychology. And I think that gave us a chance to see how various disorders that affect you both physiologically and mentally play in our common thread between the two subjects. So I think that was also very cool because we use evidence in order to detect the addiction. Like we use pedigrees from biology and we use from psychology. How we talked about how that can impact you psychologically.
[00:11:16] Speaker B: Can you say something that surprised you from your project? Something that you didn't really, really know or you didn't know well and you found out and you're like, oh my goodness, I didn't know that.
[00:11:27] Speaker F: Yeah. So we did smoking as like a nicotine addiction basically. And something that surprised me was the amount of the impact basically that risk factors have. And so if you're around people that smoke or if you're in an environment that you have peer pressure to smoke, these things impact you a lot more than I had realized originally.
[00:11:48] Speaker B: Are we talking only about cigarettes or.
[00:11:49] Speaker F: Also vap vaping as well? It's a nicotine addiction, what we studied. So it includes everything.
[00:11:54] Speaker B: Okay, that's great.
[00:11:56] Speaker G: Okay. So mine is a little bit more obvious in terms of the connection between psychology and biology. I studied sensory perception, so it was the interactions of the body with the brain. So the biology component contained, you know, the physical responses to a specific trigger. And the psychological part was the behavioral responses to that trigger. So we did, me and my partner did three experiments. One of them was the Stroop test, which basically the participants had to read out a color, but the written name of the color was in another color. So let's say you have the word red and then red would be in a blue color. Then they were supposed to read that out loud and say it as quickly as possible. And the biological thing is that you see a different color than what you're reading. So then it's. It trips out your brain and then the psychological response is that you don't really know what to say in the moment. So then you get confused. And then the second test was something visual. So we connected the brain to a visual response to something that when light gets reflected on it, this specific paint, when light gets reflected on it, it traps the light. So then you can't really see any visible features on the mask that the paint was on. And then the third one was an ice and lighter trick where we urged participants to kind of pull out their hand and then we would make them hear the lighter and then we would touch them with the ice. And their physical response was, okay, let me pull my hand back because I felt pain. But in reality, it was more the behavior that you would feel something that you didn't hear. So it confuses the brain.
[00:13:43] Speaker B: So out of the three experiments or the three conditions that you, that you studied, which one stayed with you? What's most profound in what you found?
[00:13:53] Speaker G: I'm a little bit biased because, you know, I really liked what I said to do, which was the visual one, the one where we applied a specific paint on a mask, and then we saw that we couldn't really see the visible features of that mask like the nose, the mouth, and everything else. So, yeah, that's probably my. That was probably my favorite.
[00:14:13] Speaker B: Okay, okay.
[00:14:14] Speaker H: Yes. We had the regulation of emotion section, and we started with presenting a slideshow to the participants. And basically we started explaining the biological perspective by scientifically saying how chemically it happens in our body neurotransmitters and hormones and how they shape the emotion. And from psychological point of view, we try to explain how it will eventually lead us to react to something in a certain way and come up with some possible techniques to cope with those emotions. If you experience them in intense level, and we found out the connection between them and how they're actually connected to each other by that presentation.
[00:15:02] Speaker B: Can you think of something that in real life has an application from what you described? How can you see that in real life?
[00:15:12] Speaker H: We brought us some negative core emotions that we are very likely to experience on daily basis, such as frustration, anger, or sadness.
And we try to apply how scientifically they are happening in our body and how we are behaviorally reacting to those experiences.
[00:15:35] Speaker B: And what did you find?
[00:15:36] Speaker H: Our reaction is very. Based on what we experience inside ourselves.
[00:15:41] Speaker B: I'm trying to see how you can study these emotions. How do you study this frustration in a real life situation? Every day we feel frustrated about something. How does that. How is it useful in our everyday life? Maybe you know.
[00:15:55] Speaker H: Yeah. One of the scenarios that we had as an example was about the test taking situation that the student was experiencing a high amount of anxiety and it was leading that student to forget whatever she or he had in mind, which can be harmful if you experience it very intensely.
[00:16:16] Speaker C: So physiological symptoms would include what?
[00:16:19] Speaker H: For example, your heart will start to beat faster, you start to have mind blackout to not remember things, perhaps your hands will start shaking.
[00:16:32] Speaker B: Panic attacks.
[00:16:33] Speaker H: Panic attacks, yes.
[00:16:34] Speaker B: Stress related. You're not in any particular situation, but because of what's happening. Right. That triggers.
[00:16:45] Speaker A: You are listening to the owlcast, the official podcast of ACS Athens.
[00:16:58] Speaker B: Okay, so these are all interesting, not experiments. These are interesting conditions that you have studied. And then how did you take all this to go to this conference? First of all, what conference is this and why we were invited?
[00:17:14] Speaker C: Can I add, before Dr. Says about the IB Global Conference, There was another station that the girls can be here with us today, the Brain Model demonstration station, where and Georgia were describing the different parts of the brain in terms of the lobes and what different functions they have, behaviorally speaking. So different parts of the brain in terms of their functions in behavior. And that was also very interesting. They did demonstrations on that as well. So we went to the IB Global Conference with five workshops, basically the four that were just described, plus the Brain Model.
[00:17:54] Speaker B: So we're talking now about the IB Global Global Conference that happened in Budapest, Hungary.
[00:17:59] Speaker D: We submitted a proposal amongst other worldwide proposals, and we were selected to present an hour and 15 minutes workshop as a breakout session during the conference. We realized when we went there that this conference is one of the biggest IB conferences in the world. They said in the opening session they had about 1700 participants. It happened in a beautiful city in Budapest and the attendance from all over the world. There were IB educators there, there were IB leaders, other IB community members, administrators, many people all over the world. We were the only representatives of a school located in Greece who had a presentation.
Other Greek schools attended, but they did not have a presentation. And in this session, in our session, we kind of combined everything that our students just talked about and we facilitated the same activities and conditions that you just heard about with the participants who attended our session.
[00:19:07] Speaker B: So the theme of the conference was Inspiring learners realizing potential. How did this theme tie in with what you presented and tell me your impression from the reactions of the attendees.
[00:19:21] Speaker C: I think we couldn't have had a better workshop to represent the theme of the conference.
The way I think about this is that by bridging our disciplines, by engaging in this interdisciplinary Learning beyond the classroom. So it's not something that is within the classroom walls that inspires students, inspires us as well, to help them and us realize our potential.
Because our potential is not just confined, let's say, in the classroom walls. And the learning that happens within a course isn't necessarily the sole learning that we're going to apply in life. We usually take bits and parts from different disciplines to experience life and to problem solve and to create and to apply. And I think that's the magic that's happening in our club. They get their understandings and their learnings from each of the disciplines and they apply it to something that makes sense and is then presented to other people and makes sense to them as well. So they're becoming teachers in a way. But they also realize better what this knowledge is because they experience it in a different way.
[00:20:41] Speaker B: Not only that, I mean, you can read the million books, but if you don't apply somehow what you're reading, it doesn't stay with you.
[00:20:49] Speaker C: Exactly.
[00:20:49] Speaker B: So you presented this and you had a few people down there and they looked at the different experiments, the different things that they presented. What was their reaction? What was the discussions that you had?
[00:21:01] Speaker D: I think what is also magical about what we do is the appeal. It has to symbol people to audience who is not particularly interested in biology or psychology. I mean, our audience were not only educators that teach these two subjects. They were people from other disciplines and from other positions. And if you could see them working on the activities that actually the students introduced through their videos and we just facilitated, you would see how engaged the adults were.
[00:21:31] Speaker B: So did you recreate these?
[00:21:34] Speaker D: We didn't recreate them. We kind of blended as if the students were there with us, giving the instructions and guiding the participants to find solutions to the activities. Because there were. All the activities were interactive and the participants had to do a task.
[00:21:49] Speaker B: So it was not just a video that you showed?
[00:21:51] Speaker C: No.
[00:21:52] Speaker D: And we were there facilitating or enriching what the students had said in their videos because they were not physically there with us. And the level of engagement and the comments that we heard at the end were so complimentary and so enthusiastic because participants thought that we gave them hands on ideas of how they can go back to their classrooms if they were educators and apply some of these activities in their teaching. And then there were other people who were not teaching and they said, I was so inspired and understood what my brain does now when I eat the right thing or when I feel the right thing, or what I see is not what I Think, and I think the appeal was multidimensional. And this is what makes us very proud and happy.
[00:22:38] Speaker B: When we say best practices, usually it means that everybody does something, and then someone does it a little bit better. Here you're talking about something completely new. So they've been introduced to a different way of thinking, of tying the disciplines. So from my perspective, I see that you're going and showing what the students did, but you had a different reaction from these people. Can you share any of the comments that came to you?
[00:23:06] Speaker C: One of the comments was that the presentations, the student presentations were the highlight of the workshop, that we did a good thing to incorporate them because they brought in the student perspective. And just to give you an idea, the way this was happening was that we would have the students introduce the activity. We would pause the video, let the participants engage with the activity, and then play the video for the final part where there was a clear link between a reflection as well. So that was what received very positive comments. Other comments involved. And we have a padlet. Perhaps we should have brought some of those comments here that they took away a lot of things that they can actually use in their classrooms or in their practice, or they just got inspired with ideas that they can incorporate in education in general. Interdisciplinary chemistry coming up.
[00:24:01] Speaker D: Yes, I think what the IB finds innovative, and perhaps our participants also found innovating, the fact that we blend into IB subjects, IB is restricting itself because you have a curriculum to teach, you have external exams. But the fact that we are giving some air, some space to this restricted kind of education by interdisciplinary learning and teaching is what the innovation is all about.
[00:24:33] Speaker B: And I think the idea that the students themselves came and wanted to participate. So my last comment is to the students. Now you all heard what the other students did. If you didn't do the project that you did, which one of the other projects would you do?
[00:24:52] Speaker D: Nice question.
[00:24:54] Speaker G: I would probably do the food thing because I think it's very interesting how the mind really responds to your diet. And I think because in biology especially. I'm sorry, I don't take psychology, but because I take biology, we've learned kind of how different diets shape your physical features as well as your behavioral responses. So, yeah, I would definitely want to do that.
[00:25:23] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:25:24] Speaker F: I would do micalas. I think it was really cool to see just how our brain reacts differently than what we see. So, for example, the one that you did with the ice cube, I found that really cool because you re react differently if you're not seeing what someone's doing.
[00:25:40] Speaker H: I probably would have gone with sensory perception station because it's very interesting to actually see how it works.
[00:25:49] Speaker G: Yeah, it is.
[00:25:51] Speaker E: I would probably go with Ileana station, the basically how the specifically the nicotine because a lot of my family members smoke and I found it really, really interesting how the brain works, how it affects your mental health, your physical health, your neurological health. And it's really like, interesting because these two subjects are like my passions. And it was really interesting to combine these two things and apply to something that happens in the world daily and around us every day.
[00:26:24] Speaker B: So you said you're going to go for neuropsychology for studies. What about the rest of you?
[00:26:28] Speaker G: Should I start?
[00:26:29] Speaker B: Sure.
[00:26:29] Speaker G: Okay. I want to study biomedical engineering.
[00:26:32] Speaker B: Biomedical engineering. Okay.
[00:26:34] Speaker F: I want to study public health.
[00:26:36] Speaker B: Public health.
Okay.
[00:26:38] Speaker H: I'm going to study psychology. But perhaps I would also connect it to art and study art therapy in future.
[00:26:45] Speaker B: Excellent. Wow.
Dr. Brodor, Midi, Ms. Ramos Fakidi, thank you so much for bringing this group of students and the rest of them that couldn't be here today. I think it's the best example of how cross disciplinary examination or how it affects students. And we can see now that it was not just a project for them, it's something that they want to get involved in the future. So I think that you're both working for your disciplines in some way.
[00:27:15] Speaker D: I think subconsciously that's not the target, but. But I think this is something that will grow more.
[00:27:21] Speaker B: Excellent. Thank you so much.
[00:27:23] Speaker C: Thank you for having me.
[00:27:24] Speaker B: Continue the good work.
[00:27:25] Speaker D: Thank you, students.
[00:27:28] Speaker A: You are listening to the Owlcast, the official podcast of ACS Athens. Make sure you subscribe to the Owlcast on Google podcast, Spotify and Apple podcasts. This has been a production of the ACS Athens Media Studio.
