Why did you join the BR41N.IO Hackathon 2019 in Bari with your students? And how did you and your students benefited from the event?
It was the first time for our IT undergraduate students to participate in such big international conference to join a BCI hackathon. I pushed and trained them in the summer to participate in BR41N.IO Hackathon for many reasons:
- BCI Hackathon is a great setting for students to learn from distinguished international BCI experts.
- Challenging themselves to develop and test their ideas, whereas failure does not bear any severe consequences.
- The opportunity that students compete using their technical skills in developing new BCI ideas against other international students, in a fail-safe and friendly environment.
- The possibility to win in order to get more confident and hardworking.
- And when they actually won the BR41N.IO Hackathon, they started to believe in themselves that they are able to realize anything in 24 hours.
Before the BR41N.IO Hackathon, mind-controlling a drone was a science fiction for my students. At least until they really won.

How do you teach with Unicorn Hybrid Black and what software applications do you use?
During the first weeks, I give my students an overview about brain computer interface and its most popular applications.
In the middle of the semester, I start teaching them more details about the common three BCI principles (P300, SSVEP, and Motor Imagery). Then, I introduce them to Unicorn Hybrid Black for developing their own BCI projects. I teach them how to use P300 Speller software and how to adapt it to their projects. Then how to send commands via TCP/IP from Unicorn Hybrid Black to another laptop or robot. Usually, most of my undergraduate students are able to learn more about Unicorn Hybrid Black by themselves.
In addition, I started giving a one-day BCI workshop for our IT students every semester to attract brilliant students to BCI field.
