Students at Shorter College packed into classrooms for presentations throughout the day Wed­nesday as students and faculty participated in Celebrate Shorter day.

The annual celebration of the achievement of Shorter students started off the morning with student symposiums and demonstrations on everything from knee surgery to neuroscience to a tap and jazz expo.

Seniors Tony Hicks and Rebecca Dobson, who are studying middle years education, had packed rooms for their presentation about how to use a virtual knee surgery simulator to get kids to interact with science.

“There’s some schools out there that can’t afford to buy animals for dissection,” Hicks said. “And they’re always wanting us to use technology more in the class room, so this is one way of doing it.”

Dobson and Hicks had volunteers get up and perform the tasks on a smart board during the virtual surgery, where students cut the knee open, put in the prosthetics and sewed it back up.

They told students and faculty that other options such as brain, heart and hip replacements are also available for use on the Web site edheads.org.

“Anything they can use to interact with, especially with something like the smart board, is great because they are participating and seeing science close up,” Dobson said.

Another packed classroom greeted psychology senior Kelsey Zuchegno, who presented a symposium on neurofeedback therapy for children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD.

Zuchegno said she worked with the program as an intern with Harbin Behavioral Science and worked with a technician to help children use a video game to reprogram their brainwaves.

She said children with ADHD use more theta brain waves, which usually indicates a person is drowsy and unfocused, instead of beta brain waves that indicate alertness and responsiveness in the brain.

“These video game techniques are also used in other areas like helping people with chronic headaches or post traumatic stress disorder,” Zuchegno said.

She said the program, originally developed by NASA to help their pilots, involves PlayStation games, EEG sensors and vibration feedback on a wireless controller.

Children who utilize the system are given feedback through the wireless controller when they aren’t using the correct brainwaves at an increased rate and game performance slows or stops working.

“On average children go for a minimum of 40 sessions to make this work, with the first 10 to help them get adjusted to how the system works,” she said.

In her work with the system, she said it was effective for children 80 percent of the time. Some children, Zuchegno said, aren’t able to work with the system as well.

“It varies on a child-to-child basis,” she said. “But it works well with most kids, and parents keep a journal to show how well a child is doing.”

Celebrate Shorter ended with a 45-minute session at Winthrop-King Centre, where some students were recognized for their work.