Active Learning Enabled by Information Technology in Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering
Beginning in 1999, the Department of Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering undertook a comprehensive revision of its entire curriculum, integrated around the theme “Conceive, Design, Integrate, Operate” (CDIO), an educational approach adopted to better prepare students to deal with complex aerospace engineering systems. This project transformed lectures, utilized new software and established several new subjects. [ Read More ]
Active Learning Enabled by Information Technology in Civil and Environmental Engineering
The goal of this project was to create activities that would empower students to take active roles in developing complex engineering systems ranging from buildings and bridges to entire cities. [ Read More ]
Active Learning in Mechanical Engineering
Faculty in Mechanical Engineering transformed the introductory course, Mechanics and Materials, away from the traditional large lecture format and towards a Scientific Discovery model where students participate actively. They also developed a mechatronics toolkit for use with laptops, to be used in the classroom/laboratory to run experiments and at home to interface with household appliances, power tools, toys, and workout equipment. [ Read More ]
Campus Tourbot
With a robotic Campus TourBot guide, the tourist experience of MIT’s Infinite Corridor and its connected buildings will be enhanced. The TourBot will tailor its path and style to the needs of specific groups, providing location-specific information and opportunities for tour participants to request additional in-depth information in multiple languages, as well as short films and greetings from faculty and administrators. Campus TourBot will provide an introductory touring experience of MIT that matches its reputation for research and innovation. [ Read More ]
Champion Zone: Instant Sports Challenge
The Instant Sports Challenge project created an online instant matching and notification Web service (Champion Zone) to facilitate the instantaneous challenge and acceptance of tennis/squash matches. [ Read More ]
Classroom Communicator
Large lecture halls may inhibit student participation in class discussions if they fear a negative reaction from other students. Given this common behavior, faculty often have difficulty gauging student comprehension levels in their biggest classes. Using a cell phone equipped with a Web browser, students could communicate more comfortably with their instructors. [ Read More ]
Classroom Learning Partner
clIn large classes, personal interactions between instructor and student can become almost impossible. Using the existing Microsoft Tablet PC–based Classroom Presenter system, the Classroom Learning Partner (CLP) was designed to support exercises in large classrooms, as well as smaller ones. [ Read More ]
CoMeT was created to shorten the compliant mechanism design process. The goal was to enable the designer to gain a “big picture” view of the critical facets of compliant mechanism design, fabrication and use, and to develop a simulation tool that may be used to generate and evolve new compliant mechanism designs. [ Read More ]
CycleScore
Seeing a need to make on-campus life healthier, this project fused aerobic exercise with entertainment to provide motivation on the fitness equipment of MIT workout facilities. Treadmills and stationary cycling are important components of fitness, but they lack the stimulation of sports. [ Read More ]
Devhood: Student Developer’s Community
DevHood (www.devhood.com) is an online student community for college students all over the world to come together to discuss, learn about, and teach each other about the Microsoft .NET Framework. [ Read More ]
Distributed Collaboration System for Mars Gravity
The Mars Gravity Biosatellite was a student-led project spanning three universities on two continents. Students at MIT, University of Washington, and University of Queensland collaborated to design, build, launch, and recover a low- Earth-orbiting satellite to study the effects of Martian-level gravity on mammals. The Information Systems sub-group of the Mars Gravity project team needed to create an array of distributed network servers based on Microsoft .NET technology to allow real-time access to critical information needed by the team. [ Read More ]
Domeview
This project identified the need for effective and reliable methods for large-scale communication at MIT. Overwhelmed by campus communications such as e-mails, the abundance of campus posters, and the difficulty of wordof- mouth efforts, students are provided with an alternative means of experiencing public notices with DomeView. [ Read More ]
DSpace: Archiving OpenCourseWare Materials in MIT Libraries’ Digital Archive System
As a result of this iCampus project, OpenCourseWare is now automatically archived to DSpace, using standards for content packaging as well as Web Services, and this valuable educational content is now under professional management for preservation over archival time frames. [ Read More ]
Expeditions: Learning from Pictures
Scientific expeditions are life-altering experiences for the researchers who get to experience them. These expeditions generate incredible research and also incredible photography chronicling their field work, which, before this project, had no formal management or archiving methods. With the image pipeline developed by this project, everything a field team captures can be almost transparently stored in a sensible, sharable, and safe repository. [ Read More ]
Fluids: Engineering School Modular Program for Fluid Mechanics
The Fluids modules provide dynamic delivery that is rich in content and tailored to the students’ interests, preparation, skill levels, and learning styles. By replacing the redundant courses on fluid mechanics in multiple departments with these innovative modules, educational interactions among faculty, students, alumni, and industries are enhanced. [ Read More ]
Frontdesk: Web-Based Dormitory Management System
Many dormitories were plagued by inefficient and ineffective front desk systems, which often resulted in missing DVDs, lost or stolen packages, and a number of other problems. FrontDesk provided a tool for dormitories across the MIT campus to help facilitate reception desk functions. The customizable system allowed individual dorms to quickly search and locate dorm resources, such as equipment, DVDs, and other resources in real time. [ Read More ]
Games to Teach
This project was an interdisciplinary collaboration between faculty, staff, and students across humanities, sciences, and engineering to develop a series of conceptual prototypes for teaching science and engineering courses with games at the advanced high school and early college levels. [ Read More ]
Huggable: A Robotic Companion for Therapeutic Applications
The Huggable is an interactive teddy bear, designed to be a new type of robotic companion for therapeutic applications. [ Read More ]
iCampus Framework
The iCampus Framework project demonstrated the benefits of a service-oriented architecture for the educational computing infrastructure at MIT. These benefits included the ability to modularize implementations of educational computing applications, create reusable components, and enable component and resource sharing within the university and across institutions. [ Read More ]
iDat: Web-Based Wireless Sensors for Education
The iDAT project, which was designed with the hope of developing 50 low-cost, miniature sensors and software environments to support them, eventually acquired over 100 wireless sensors for use in student projects. [ Read More ]
iGem: International Genetically Engineered Machine Competitions
The idea of engineering and building simple biological systems from standard, interchangeable parts that can operate within living cells is a compelling challenge. A serious obstacle in this new discipline of Synthetic Biology is the need for the development of standardized biological parts that are well specified and able to be paired with other parts of systems. Design competitions, such as robotics competitions, are a proven way of using student challenges to stimulate design, so this project was designed to bring that concept to this emerging field of biology. [ Read More ]
iLab: Remote Online Laboratories
iLab is dedicated to the proposition that online laboratories – real laboratories accessed through the Internet – can enrich science and engineering education by greatly expanding the range of experiments that students are exposed to in the course of their education. Unlike conventional laboratories, iLabs can be shared across a university or across the world. The iLabs vision is to share expensive equipment and educational materials associated with lab experiments as broadly as possible within higher education and beyond. [ Read More ]
iLabNotebook
The traditional paper notebooks used in laboratories can limit the sharing of information with colleagues. Adding electronic media as a supplement to notes allows data to be more easily recorded and then accessed from a shared lab knowledge base. The laboratory environment provides an ideal place for evaluating new technologies and experimenting with revolutionary concepts of conducting research. [ Read More ]
iLearn: .NET-Based Open Source Education Platform
MIT’s Sloan School developed a proprietary course management system called SloanSpace. iLearn furthered this concept with a scaleable, open source e-learning platform with rich functionality for online communities, as well as management for learning and content. Compliant with MIT’s Open Knowledge Initiative and MIT’s infrastructure standards, iLearn was implemented using enterprise-ready, flexible architecture based on the Microsoft .NET Framework. [ Read More ]
iMatch: A Decentralized Multi-Agents Application
Finding personal academic connections at a large, highly decentralized academic environment like MIT can be a challenge. If they can be located, students can benefit from study partners or faculty mentors seeking research assistants. [ Read More ]
iMOAT: MIT Online Assessment Tool
iMOAT, the iCampus MIT Online Assessment Tool, is a service for Web-based administration and grading of writing examinations. It has been used for assessing writing skills of MIT entering students since 1998 and refined by writing instruction experts at five major universities. [ Read More ]
iQuarium
he principles of fluid dynamics involved in ocean engineering are not widely understood. Using 3D modeling and rendering software, the student team created a colorful, interactive, hydrodynamically accurate display of animated swimming fish to bring these concepts to life on a public display screen. [ Read More ]
LAMP: Library Access to Music Project
The illegal sharing of digital music content across users at universities has generated headlines and lawsuits. However, the availability of legal access to university music libraries can enhance the quality of life and learning for students. The LAMP project explored the idea that the licensing rules governing analog transmission are very different than for digital, and thus, using the MIT cable network, music on demand can be provided much more cheaply than over the MIT digital network. [ Read More ]
Learning by Doing
The exploration of fusing technology with pedagogical models is key to the iCampus Alliance. The Learning by Doing project was a collaboration between faculty in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) that drew upon the expertise of the VaNTH Bioengineering Education Technologies project. [ Read More ]
Magic Paper
Natural Interaction will let computer tools capture and understand ideas that are today captured in pencil on scraps of paper. This capability can introduce design capture into the earliest stages of the design process and radically shorten the design cycle. MIT’s Design Rationale Group is working to imbue a wide variety of surfaces with natural interaction capabilities, ranging from active whiteboards, to tablet computers, to desktops in classrooms and benches in laboratories. This vision of computing spans the range from tablet computer notebooks full of Natural Interaction to a new concept of desktop computing: your (physical) desktop should compute. [ Read More ]
New Assessment Protocols Using the Tablet PC
The project identified the need for more comprehensive and empirical standards for use in the assessment of educational technology. In consideration of this, the project developed a number of research controls. Among others, this included carefully monitored experimental and control groups using the split-half method and a differentiated analysis of performance scores for each student. Through this process, the project was able to quantify and validate some of the factors that seem to make the Microsoft Tablet PC useful and effective for learning. [ Read More ]
Next-Generation Mobile Classroom
Designed specifically for use within the lecture hall, students with the project PDAs displayed outlines of the day’s lecture, allowing students to enter questions anonymously. Teaching assistants fielded the questions, allowing the instructors to address them at their discretion. Instructors could gauge student understanding by administering mini-quizzes via PDA. Outside of the lecture, students were able to use their devices to find study group partners and view updated exam schedules. The special-use PDAs provided a powerful example of how devices can serve to build stronger connections between instructors, their course content, and students. [ Read More ]
Online Learning: Technologically Enhanced Education in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
The Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department created a Web-based delivery system for lectures, based on audio narrated slides and interactive uses of different combinations of online presentations based on narrated Microsoft® PowerPoint® slides and interactive assignments that provide immediate feedback, and deployed it in several core departmental subjects. This included completely eliminating live lectures in the introductory computer science course from fall 2000 through spring 2004, and continuing to use the material as lecture supplements. All students clearly agree there are strong advantages to the online lectures. It permits them to repeat missed details, clarify confusions, and works with the course material on their own schedules. The system also includes a platform (xTutor) for developing and administering online homework assignments with interactive tutorial feedback, and these assignments are now a staple feature of several department subjects. [ Read More ]
OpenAfrica: Educational Technology in Sub-Saharan Africa
Incorporating the technologies of MIT’s OpenCourseWare (OCW) and iLabs to provide remote access to MIT laboratories, the project demonstrated a sustainable model for sharing education content with this part of the developing world, initially Cameroon, Zambia, and Kenya. Besides providing a valuable resource to the African universities involved, MIT students were also able to evaluate the effectiveness of the new technologies and prove, over great distances, the power of remote learning. [ Read More ]
OpenHealth: Patient Case Tracking for Home-Based Care in Zambia
Working with the 60 Community Home-Based Care (CHBC) programs of the Catholic Archdiocese in Lusaka, Zambia, the OpenHealth project helped digitize records in the form of a database with a Web-based front end allowing data entry and record analysis. The combined efforts of U.S.-based nonprofits and local community healthcare have enhanced the care of over 20,000 patients. [ Read More ]
OpenWetWare: A Collaborative Information Tool for the Biological Research Community
OpenWetWare is a portal created and maintained by MIT graduate students in biology that promotes the open sharing of research, education, publication, and discussion in biological sciences and engineering. It provides a place for laboratories and individuals to organize their own information and collaborate with others easily and efficiently. [ Read More ]
placeMap: Building Community Through Active Context Mapping
The placeMap project provided a uniquely personalized view of a user’s community life within an active spatial landscape, rather than through traditional interactive campus
maps. By drawing information from databases, interpreting that data, and displaying it in relevant ways, placeMap optimizes students’ views of opportunities for community interaction. [ Read More ]
POSIT: Developing Public Opinions on Science Using Information Technologies
Designed for a museum environment, the POSIT project utilized Augmented Reality (AR) games previously developed by the Teacher Education Program and role-playing to help participants better understand alternative views.
These games allowed participants to move through physical spaces with a Microsoft Pocket PC and interact with virtual characters to help illuminate matters of public health, forensics, and history. Participants could express opinion ratings with a handheld slider, showing how new evidence could provide a rationale to form new opinions. These participatory simulations encouraged students to investigate the complex facets of difficult issues in order to arrive at informed decisions—a vital skill in complicated times. [ Read More ]
PREP: Peer-Review Evaluation Process
PREP, or Peer-Review Evaluation Process, is a design methodology for use in teams. It is a process by which four to six individuals develop ideas and then share them as a team, so that the team can then select the best idea. [ Read More ]
RiverRat: Real-Time Boat Tracking for MIT Sailing
The RiverRat project designed hardware and software to track MIT sailboats on the Charles River. Recording and playback of sailing tracks allowed for post-race analysis of tactics, strategy, and performance. Lightweight and robust, the tracking system is designed to follow up to 30 boats on the river, helping increase spectator involvement and serving as a tool for instructing sailing to both novices and advanced sailors. [ Read More ]
The Robotic Futbol Club of Cambridge
Competition is an excellent stimulant for great student design in robotics. Supporting a strong student robotics team internationally not only gives hands-on experience outside of the classroom, it also generates wider interest in robotics and artificial intelligence. The goal of this project was to design a team of soccer-playing robots to compete with other robots nationally and internationally in RoboCup and to also create a lasting foundation for an MIT team after its original members have graduated. [ Read More ]
Robot World: Technology Infrastructure for Project-Based Learning
Robot World systematized project-based courses to make them more deployable. The faculty team developed several tools and systems that leveraged Web-based learning services and knowledge checkpoints to ensure the learning of fundamental concepts and project-based design education stayed on a focused track. [ Read More ]
ShuttleTrack
Many MIT students who work late into the night rely on SafeRide vans to get back to their dorm or residence. Like any public transportation, however, the shuttles are subject to traffic and weather conditions, which can delay their arrival. Using GPS technology to track the shuttles online, students could access accurate, up-to-the-minute arrival times. [ Read More ]
Singapore: Creating the Global Classroom
The mission of enabling the truly global classroom requires international partnership. Building on the existing Singapore– MIT Alliance (SMA), the Singapore project was initiated to identify, test, and evaluate alternative pedagogies and the technology required to support them. The Singapore project helped prioritize promising experiments and pilot tests that could be conducted as part of SMA and further its existing methodologies, with a major focus on the design of rich asynchronous content and interaction for distance education courses. [ Read More ]
STEFS: Software Tools for Environmental Field Study
To assist field studies, the project created an electronic field notebook application that was capable of integrating and storing data collection from environmental and GPS sensors, and making computations from the field based on the data. This information could be easily displayed to field workers on-site and to others through an Internet site. The project provided hands-on product development experience to undergraduate engineering majors and incorporated programming for Windows CE, the technologies related to field studies, and actual testing on a trip to New Zealand and Australia. Projects like STEFS offer students a full view of software development—including conceptualizing, planning, developing, testing, and making the improvements needed to improve their studies out in the field. [ Read More ]
Spoken Lecture Processing: Transcription, Tagging, and Retrieval
This project used automatic speech recognition technologies to create systems that automatically transcribe, annotate, and even summarize recorded audio and video material by means of robust speaker-independent speech processing. The project researchers have created a publicly accessible demonstration lecture browser where video lectures from MIT OpenCourseWare and MIT World can be explored, using a search engine that indexes the automatic transcription. One goal of this work is to provide search and indexing capabilities for all OpenCourseWare video material. [ Read More ]
StudioMIT: Learning Communities in Design Education
A crucial part of creative learning in studio-centered professional degree programs is the sharing of intellectual products with the greater community. StudioMIT provided an infrastructure for an open-ended collection of course curricula, digital images, workspaces, and exhibition spaces, all enhanced with communication capabilities. The interactive personal work and exhibitions areas created by the project allowed members to represent themselves and their work to the community. [ Read More ]
TEAL – Technology Enabled Active Learning
Technology-enabled active learning is a teaching format that merges lectures, simulations, and hands-on desktop experiments to create a rich collaborative learning experience. By the fall of 2005, TEAL will be used for almost all MIT introductory physics instruction. [ Read More ]
Topobo: 3D Constructive Assembly System With Kinetic Memory
The project invented a constructive, 3D assembly system that was capable of recording and playing back physical motion. Just as children can learn about static systems by playing with blocks, playing with a Topobo set allows them to learn about dynamic systems and sculpt dynamic biomorphic forms in motion. By combining the most creative elements of educational manipulative toys with computation and direct manipulation abilities, Topobo investigated a compelling alternative model for using computers in elementary education. [ Read More ]
Visualizing Cultures: A Visual Learning Environment
Using new technologies, Visualizing Cultures weds images and commentary to illuminate social and cultural history in innovative ways. A narrative “Core Exhibit” not only gives the historical significance of the images, but also addresses issues such as genre and medium. Each unit comes with a comprehensive curriculum and carefully annotated digital archive of images from public and private sources. [ Read More ]
xMAS: Cross Media Annotation System
XMAS – the iCampus Cross Media Annotation System provides tools to enhance the use of video and image collections in humanities courses and in any subject in which precise reference to visual materials is needed. Close reading, analysis and sharing of interpretation of textual materials has long been a central part of humanities teaching and learning. XMAS is based on the idea that humanities education is increasingly multimedia in character. We now need to reference film segments and images as rapidly and precisely as we can turn the pages of a printed book to find a marked passage to discuss or incorporate into an essay. And we need to share our interpretations in on-line discussions and as image-rich essays that can be read and responded to over the Internet. [ Read More ]
