In Chinese Schools, Brain-Reading Headbands Measure Student Focus

You can't slack off with this brain-reading headband!

No Rest

Chinese schools are taking extreme measures to make sure that students are paying attention.

Over the past few months, several schools have made students wear a headband that measures the brain's electrical activity to track whether students are focused at any given moment, The Next Web reports. It's a jarring level of high tech discipline in the classroom — and one that seems like it's more exhausting than beneficial for young students.

High Score!

The headband, manufactured by Boston-based tech company BrainCo Inc, uses built-in EEG scanners to track whether a student is focused or daydreaming.

All that information gets sent to a teacher's computer, giving them a real-time feed of which students are focused. But BrainCo didn't stop there: it also built a leaderboard of students who focus for the greatest amount of time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=71&v=fQ3eW3qQ2pk

Good Intentions

The idea behind the headband is that it could give teachers insight into how to better educate their students, according to The Next Web. For instance, if teachers notice that certain students keep losing focus during certain activities, they could change the curriculum or work one-on-one with particular students.

But odds are that there are better ways to give personalized attention to students — such as cutting down on class sizes — than strapping brain-scanning headbands onto all of them.

READ MORE: China is reportedly trialing attention-detecting bands in schools [The Next Web]

More on education: This Ebook Company Is Trying to Make Reading More Like Videogames