Edheads Deep Brain Stimulation Case Study

The Client: Edheads.org, a non profit organization dedicated to helping students learn by providing interactive programs for hard-to-teach subjects.   

The Need:

Edheads needed a 30-minute interactive representation/presentation of a 4-month deep brain stimulation surgery operation.

The Clearly Trained Solution:

Edheads.org came to us for the project, as we’ve been working with them since the beginning (2000). In that time, their website has grown to over 30-40 million visits a year with an average 6.5 minutes time spent per visitor.

For this particular program, whose development ran from Dec 15th 2008 – Feb 10th 2009, we were a large part of the creative process, as we were trying to fit a 4-month surgery into 30 minutes.

Project Details:

The research phase was interesting, as it included trips to the Ohio State Medical Center to watch live brain surgeries. Once research was finished / approved, we worked with writer Gail Wheatley of EdHeads to finalize the narration and script. We then created the animations for the project, complete with multiple characters, hospital rooms and environments, custom audio, and even a few hidden “Easter Eggs”.

Once a rough program was complete, it was sent to surgeons for suggested revisions, and the tentative final release was then tested with students and adults for a final debugging and revision.  

End Result:

Since its launch in early 2009, the deep brain stimulation program has been used nearly 7 million times, making it the #1 activity on Edheads.org (the previous champ had been our virtual knee surgery, which held the top spot for more than six years!)

You can see the finished product at:

http://www.edheads.org/activities/brain_stimulation/ 

This project also won a “best kids mobile game” award at the 2010 Las Vegas Consumer Electronics show. In addition, the Ohio State Medical Center (who along with Edheads was a client) was so pleased with the results that they are looking to fund additional projects based on the nervous system.

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