🎉 A very satisfying moment for me in my MIT journey: A first-year course I first taught in fall 2020, SP.248 NEET Ways of Thinking, has just been published on MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW). See the first comment on this post for the link to the course.
SP.248 is a case-based learning course taught in the 1st semester of the academic year (fall) and open to all first-year students at MIT. Students work in small teams on challenges taken from the interdisciplinary tracks in New Engineering Education Transformation (NEET), a project-centric, cross-departmental program for sophomores, juniors, and seniors at MIT.
Every challenge in SP.248 centers around a different "NEET way of thinking" involved with problem-solving.
🤖 Autonomous Machines: Using algorithmic thinking to formulate a strategy for a mini car-robot to find balls on a grid as quickly as possible (done in Scratch, a no-code platform).
🌍 Climate & Sustainability Systems: Using systems thinking to describe and suggest improvements to the design of a real-world clean energy solution.
🏙 Digital Cities: Using creative thinking to make Cambridge more cycler-friendly.
🔬 Living Machines: Using systems thinking to design microfluidic devices.
🖇 Synthetic thinking challenge: Using algorithmic, creative, and systems thinking to design a cost-effective method for students to choose their major at MIT.
✂ Bonus challenge: Casting and molding of a wooden figurine using aljasafe and plaster - a rare opportunity for first-year students at MIT to make something physical.
SP.248 is a way of introducing 1st-year students to approaches for real-world problem solving, providing them with an antidote against siloed thinking. It's also a way of introducing them to the NEET program.
The course includes preparation, application, and reflection assignments, to facilitate and encourage students' active learning. Each section/module can be taken independently.
I developed the syllabus and instruction for this course together with my colleagues, NEET thread instructors (past and present) Dr. Cong Cong, Dr. Gregory Long, Justin Lavallee, Dr. Mehdi Salek, Dr. Nathan Melenbrink, and Prof. Yuan Lai. I'd like to thank them all for making this innovative course happen. I also wish to thank NEET's founding executive director Dr. Amitava 'Babi' Mitra for giving me the opportunity to lead the design and instruction of this course. And last but not least, a big thank you to MIT OpenCourseWare for the time, effort and skill it took to adapt the course materials to the OCW format.
👉 I encourage my educator colleagues (lecturer, teacher, parent, or otherwise) to check out the various challenges and see whether any of them would be of interest and benefit to you and your students. Any questions, comments, or suggestions? Please contact me directly, I'd love to hear from you!
#activeLearning #caseBasedLearning #complexProblemSolving #firstYearEducation #interdisciplinaryLearning #stemEducation #thinkingSkills