For school pupils

Three young pupils sit in a small room and turn the knobs of an instrument.

Our most important activities involve welcoming roughly 2,000 high-school students each year to the student lab. These activities cover a variety of forms, from one-day visits, to workshops and holiday academies lasting several days.

One-day senior high school visits to the student lab

On the one-day school visits, which run during term-time approx. three or four times a week (approx. 140 sessions per school year), class groups gain insights into the mystery of the brain. Working in small groups, the school pupils devise their own questions and conduct experiments.

Planning a visit to the student lab

The student lab is open on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays. Please write to us at uwe.ilg@uni-tuebingen.de to arrange a date for a visit.

The experiments we offer cover six areas of neuroscience and mostly relate to the research carried out at the Werner Reichardt Centre for Integrative Neuroscience (CIN) and the Hertie Institute for Clinical Brain Research (HIH). The school pupils conduct their own choice of experiment in small groups supervised by student assistants, who are usually taking a neuroscience-related degree, and sometimes with voluntary support from scientists from CIN or the director of the student lab.

Biology classes can attend the student lab during school term.

We offer the following experiments:

I. Anatomy and histology of the nervous system
    1. Preparing a lamb’s brain and examining brain sections using a microscope
II. Electrical activities of nerve and muscle cells
    2. Intracellular discharges from nerve cells (snails) not currently available
    3. Extracellular discharges from action potentials (cockroach)
    4. Electrical fish
III. Neurobiology of the sensory systems
    5. Psychophysics: Seeing
    6. Psychophysics: Hearing
IV. Neurobiology of the motor systems
    7. Electromyography (EMG)
    8. Eye movements
V. Theoretical neurobiology
    9. Digital image processing
    10. Programming a robot
VI. Higher functions of the brain
   11. Motor learning
    12. Electroencephalography (EEG)
   13. Attention

Please bear in mind that we have a limited number of student assistants. We cannot conduct more than six experiments at the same time.

Details about your visit

Summary of the experiments

Materials for teaching
Brief brochure about the brain

Intensive courses and internships

As well as laboratory visits we offer a range of intensive courses . Most of these courses take place in the holidays. They give school pupils the chance to realize their own neurobiology project within a short time.

Summer Academy Neuroscience

Each year, the student lab organizes a holiday academy for roughly 20 school pupils. This takes the participants through their own neurobiology project over several days. They then present and discuss the results in the group. There are also lectures and encounters with local neuroscientists, and of course an accompanying program including visits to Tübingen research institutes such as the Werner Reichardt Centre for Integrative Neuroscience, the Hertie Institute for Clinical Brain Research or the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics. In addition, we provide food and drink, and the evenings end with films or a sociable barbeque.

A holiday academy is not just a place to learn, but also somewhere pupils have fun in the student lab. We love to read their feedback:

Equivalent assessment of student performance

It is possible to complete experimental work (Equivalent assessment of student performance (GFS)) in the student lab in the school holidays. Please contact us to learn more.

Study orientation internships

You are very welcome to take an internship with us to help with your choice of studies and assist in the student lab as a supervisor. Please contact us to learn more.

Careers guidance internship (BOGY)

High schools in Baden-Württemberg offer careers and study guidance internships under the name BOGY. This initiative combines several programs, including a crucial role played by an official, documented internship program.

For several years, the neuroscience student lab has also offered the opportunity to take a careers guidance internship with us. Our goal is to encourage school pupils to take up science, and we use every possible means to do this. This includes giving them a hands-on experience of how science works and what being a scientist feels like on the BOGY program: to date, more than 100 school pupils have completed an internship in the student lab and thereby gained insights into current research issues and learned what it could be like to take up scientific studies.

Please contact us if you are interested in a BOGY internship.

Feedback about the 2022 holiday academy

“I really enjoyed the student academy in neuroscience. We were able to do the entire experiment at last, which we’ve never been able to do in school because of a lack of equipment or too large classes. In the academy we could do everything ourselves and in the end all of us presented our results to each other. We were also able to talk with scientists from the field...”

Greta Miener, 12th form, LGH