STEM education

IEEE Spectrum reporter Willie D. Jones spotlights Prof. Wesley Harris, who has “not only advanced the field of aerospace engineering but has also paved the way for future generations to soar.” Jones notes Harris’ commitment to “fostering the next generation of engineers, particularly students of color.” Harris explains: “I’ve always wanted to be like my high school teacher—a physicist who not only had deep knowledge of the scientific fundamentals but also compassion and love for Black folks.” 

Boston Globe columnist Scott Kirsner spotlights Prof. Mitchel Resnick, Prof. Neil Gershenfeld, and the late Prof. Emeritus Woodie Flowers and their work developing programs that “get kids excited about, and more proficient in, STEM.” Kirsner underscores: “Each of the initiatives brings some of the hands-on problem solving, messiness, and collaborative prototyping elements of MIT’s culture into the wider world. And they’ve all had a big impact on the way kids learn about technology.”

The final round of the Zero Robotics competition at the MIT Media Lab featured high school students from around the country facing off in a programming challenge using the SPHERES satellites aboard the International Space Station, reports Glenn Jones for NBC Boston. The event “welcomed about 70 middle schoolers from diverse backgrounds to participant in the finals of a robotics competition that featured live dialogue with astronauts on the International Space Station.”

Prof. Armando Solar-Lezama speaks with The Wall Street Journal reporter Isabelle Bousquette about large language models (LLMs) in academia. Instead of building LLMs from scratch, Solar-Lezama suggests “students and researchers are focused on developing applications and even creating synthetic data that could be used to train LLMs,” writes Bousquette. 

BioBuilder, a program spun out of MIT that is being used in 1,000 high schools across the country, aims to provide high school students with an opportunity to experience engineering and problem solving in the classroom, reports Kelly Sullivan for Boston 25 News. “We’re really hoping to help attract students to the field and get them interested and, train them up so that the industry can have the talent they need,” says BioBuilder Executive Director Natalie Kuldell. 

Prof. Hal Abelson speaks with Inside Higher Ed reporter Lauren Coffey about AI policies in academia. “We put tremendous emphasis on creating with AI but that’s the sort of place that MIT is,” says Abelson. “It’s about making things. Other places have a very different view of this.”

Prof. Kristala Prather, head of MIT's Department of Chemical Engineering, speaks with Nature reporter Alessio Lavino about what inspired her research on metabolic engineering and how her work in industry helped shape her career in academia. “The potential to educate, encourage and support the next generation of scientists and engineers in an educational setting gives me a chance to amplify my impact far beyond what I could ever personally do as an individual,” says Prather. “I cannot think of any higher honor than serving in a capacity that enables me to facilitate their emergence.”

Break Through Tech A.I., a new program hosted and supported by MIT and a number of other universities, is providing free artificial intelligence courses to “reduce obstacles to tech careers for underrepresented college students, including lower-income, Latina and Black young women,” reports Natasha Singer for The New York Times. The program “aims to help lower-income students, many of whom have part-time jobs on top of their schoolwork, learn A.I. skills, develop industry connections and participate in research projects they can discuss with job recruiters,” writes Singer. 

MIT and Google are offering a free Generative AI for Educators course “designed to help middle and high school teachers learn how to use generative AI tools to personalize instruction, develop creative lessons and save time on administrative tasks,” reports Jack Kelly for Forbes.

Boston Globe reporter Malcolm Gay spotlights the “AI: Mind the Gap” exhibition at the MIT Museum, “which explores the social, cultural, and political implications of deepfakes and other forms of generative AI.” The exhibit is “meant to address the idea that technology can manipulate what we perceive as true or false,” said Lindsay Bartholomew, exhibit content and experience developer for the MIT Museum. “But you also need to appreciate what you can do as a human, you have some agency here.”

Alicia Chong Rodriguez SM ’17, SM ’18 founded Bloomer Tech, a health tech startup that aims to improve health care diagnostics for women using medical-grade data to develop new therapies and care models, reports Carol Eisenberg for The Washington Post. Rodriguez and her colleagues "developed, patented and tested flexible washable circuits to turn articles of clothing into devices that can relay reams of information to the wearer’s smartphone,” writes Eisenberg.

As MIT’s fall semester was starting, President Sally Kornbluth spoke with Ben Wildavsky, host of the Higher Ed Spotlight podcast, about the importance of incorporating the humanities in STEM education and the necessity of breaking down silos between disciplines to tackle pressing issues like AI and climate change. “Part of the importance of us educating our students is they’re going to be out there in the world deploying these technologies. They’ve got to understand the implications of what they’re doing,” says Kornbluth. “Our students will find themselves in positions where they’re going to have to make decisions as to whether these technologies that were conceived for good are deployed in ways that are not beneficial to society. And we want to give them a context in which to make those decisions.” 

Writing for The Boston Globe, Prof. Mitchel Resnick explores how a new coding app developed by researchers from the Lifelong Kindergarten group is aimed at allowing young people to use mobile phones to create interactive stories, games and animations. Resnick makes the case that with “appropriate apps and support, mobile phones can provide opportunities for young people to imagine, create, and share projects.”

Prof. Eric Klopfer, co-director of the RAISE initiative (Responsible AI for Social Empowerment in Education), speaks with GBH reporter Diane Adame about the importance of providing students guidance on navigating artificial intelligence systems. “I think it's really important for kids to be aware that these things exist now, because whether it's in school or out of school, they are part of systems where AI is present,” says Klopfer. “Many humans are biased. And so the [AI] systems express those same biases that they've seen online and the data that they've collected from humans.”

New York Times reporter Siobhan Roberts spotlights Yulia’s Dream, a free math enrichment and research program for exceptional high school students in Ukraine organized through the MIT Department of Mathematics. “Mathematics is often misunderstood as a solitary endeavor,” says Lecturer Slava Gerovitch. “One cannot be a successful mathematician without being integrated into these international networks for the exchange of knowledge.”