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My brief year and a half co-designing with the Neurovivid project here at TERC has been a blast. From collaborating on ideas, to building them and testing them out – this has been an impactful chapter of my life. Starting in the summer of 2023, I was a bit nervous collaborating as this was my first internship at the time. But within a week or two, I was already ideating with these wonderful people. With the entirety of this process taking place virtually, I felt like I was able to express myself without the feeling of prying eyes. It was also helpful that the adults were accepting of the other co-designers and my quirks (and occasional tangents).

Something that I feel like was my area of expertise was the circuits – since I had  prior experience with them and had made projects.These projects let me express my creativity and passion. The various little exercises we did with the EEG headsets allowed for us to add our own bits and bobs making the process more engaging. My personal favorite of these was when we had to make up/modify the code of the LCD display to do/measure different things. There were also the times when the process veered a bit, like when the block coding software we were using (Mblock) wouldn’t run on some of our computers, and when some of the code snippets took a bit of fiddling to work properly.

Through the ups and downs, I have gotten a lot out of this program. I’ve learned what it is to be a co-designer and part of a bigger process. I also have grown, be it the experience working with others or the deepened understanding of how the brain works. I would say only good has come out of this internship, and I am more prepared for what is to come.