Grasp

SANJAY SARMA is the head of Open Learning at MIT. A professor of mechanical engineering by training, he has worked in the fields of energy and transportation; computational geometry; computer assisted design; and has been a pioneer in RFID technology. He has an undergraduate degree from IIT Kanpur as well as advanced degrees from Carnegie Mellon and UC Berkeley.

LUKE YOQUINTO is a science writer who covers learning and education, as well as aging and demographic change in his role as a researcher at the MIT AgeLab. His work can be found in publications such as The Washington Post, Slate, The Wall Street Journal, and The Atlantic. He is a graduate of Boston University's science journalism program.

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The Learning Divide

It was the last day of February 2017, and Amos Winter, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at MIT, was warning the group of sophomores in his afternoon lab section about the destructive potential of their batteries. Though supposedly safe, in the unlikely event of a sudden discharge, each of the lithium polymer batteries scattered on the conference table possessed enough energy to maim, even kill.

How much energy, exactly? Go ahead ­slam it into a calculator, he said. After approximately ten seconds, anyone who had worked it out was keeping the answer to herself, so Winter bounded over to a whiteboard. You know the capacity of the battery, he explained, which came labeled in units of milliampere hours. You basically just add in time to figure out energy in joules, he said, and in short order, the answer was on the board: 13,320 joules. That s the equivalent to lifting a Honda Civic ten meters off the ground, he said. Imagine a Honda Civic falling on your hand ­that s the kind of damage an exploding lithium polymer battery could inflict. If the casing on such a battery begins to bubble, he said, chuck it in one of the lab s many sand buckets and run in the opposite direction.

In the absence of any such catastrophes, however, class would continue to hum along as it had for the first few weeks of the semester. In addition to the batteries, sitting on the table in front of each student was a simple robot ­two wheels and a skid designed to drag along the ground ­which would serve as a sort of training vehicle, in anticipation of the more complex robots the class would build later in the semester. On these practice bots, which Winter dubbed Mini-­Mes, the students would learn mechanical engineering principles ranging from simple to complex. They would start by learning to code a microcontroller (that is, a very small computer) to run an electric motor; later, they would instill in their Mini-­Mes the capacity to navigate the world autonomously like rudimentary self-­driving cars. Along the way, they would learn not just robotics knowledge and skills, but how to think like designers and engineers. They would come to understand how to approach a task creatively, to spot issues before they become serious problems, and, perhaps most important, to gain a level of trust in their own ability to guide a project from early phase, when there are innumerable paths to a desired solution, to late, when there s only one best way forward.

That was the learning progression in theory, at least. In practice, some of Course 2.007 s students were coming to it with more engineering experience than others. Some had competed in high-­school robotics tournaments. (The best-­known extracurricular robotics organization, FIRST Robotics, had actually spun out of MIT s original version of Course 2.007, back in 1989.) And the rumor mill had already made it known that one student, Alex Hattori, had competed on Battlebots, a televised contest known for its metal-­on-­metal violence. He and his teammates had sent a buzz-­saw-­wielding robot the size of a manhole cover into a gladiatorial arena, to wage war on opponents with names like SawBlaze and Overhaul.

To the other 164 students who lacked such head starts, these advantages were cause for real concern. In MIT s charged academic atmosphere, stress among students is a perennial issue, and unnecessary competition, usually over grades, does not help. Most of the time, the Institute works hard to dampen this instinct ­for instance, by abolishing grades in the first semester of freshman year. But Course 2.007 is different. Competition is baked into it at a deep level, and is the reason why it is arguably MIT s most famous under