Hoel was an artist long before science piqued her interest. She attended an arts high school in Natick, Massachusetts, but while at Hampshire College, she enrolled in a Neuroscience 101 course and was hooked. After that, Hoel spent time “running from the lab to the studio,” studying both neuroscience and sculpture. All of that knowledge about brain regions and neurotransmitters has spilled over into the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based artist’s work ever since. She’s arranged images of brain cortex slices like a swarm of cobalt butterflies, painted a topographical model of the New York City skyline with an overlay of a brain activity scan, and made a gif that displays a month of frontal lobe activation.
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
