Brainbee 2024

The International Brainbee (https://www.thebrainbee.org/) is a competition for high school students to demonstrate their knowledge of the brain. The Brainbee is modelled on other such competitions in Mathematics or Biology. Neuroscience isn’t taught in highschool as a separate subject, which can make it harder for highschool students to get a nice impression of the field.

Since last year, I’ve been involved in the Dutch Brainbee (Nederlandse Hersenolympiade, https://hersenolympiade.nl/en/). Each year we recruit enthusiastic participants from highschools across the country to join us in a national version of the competition. The winner of the national competition can then go on to participate in the International Brainbee.

This year, we invited our national champion, Gina Dijkstra, to complete the (online) international test here at the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience. I was very impressed with Gina’s knowledge on neuroscience and proud that she made it this far in the competition! The Australian participant ended up winning the International Brainbee.

I’ve added a video of Gina in which she describes what it was like to participate and how she prepared. Very much looking forward to next year’s edition and to get inspired again by all the clever highschool brains (and of course I’m a little jealous: I wish my brain was more tuned to competitions like these at the time!)