In this seminar, students will design and perfect a digital environment to house the activities of large-scale organizations of people making bottom-up decisions, such as with citizen-government affairs, voting corporate shareholders or voting members of global non-profits and labor unions. A working Open Source prototype created last semester will be used as the starting point, featuring collaborative filtering and electronic agent technology pioneered at the Media Lab. This course focuses on development of online spaces as part of an interdependent human environment, including physical architectures, mapped work processes and social/political dimensions.
A cross-disciplinary approach will be taken; students with background in architecture, urban planning, law, cognition, business, digital media and computer science are encouraged to participate. No prior technical knowledge is necessary, though a rudimentary understanding of web page creation is helpful.

In this lesson, students create a compass and apply their reasoning about magnetism to how compasses work to help us navigate around the globe while utilizing the Earth’s magnetic field.

In this activity, students investigate the effect that weight has on rocket flight. Students construct a variety of their own straw-launched rockets, or "strawkets," that have different weights. Specifically, they observe what happens when the weight of a strawket is altered by reducing its physical size and using different construction materials. Finally, the importance of weight distribution in a rocket is determined.

IntroductionThis lesson seed includes lesson plans and resources to assist Social Studies teachers in elementary classrooms.  These is a section dedicated to grades 1-3 that focuses on map skills, modes of transportation, how goods are transported and how people change the earth.  There is also a section dedicated to grades 4-5 that focuses on the physical features and grography of Maryland and the United States. At the bottom of the resources is an academic vocabulary word list for key concepts to consider providing visual support to assist you in tailoring your lessons to ELL students within your classroom, along with link to WIDA CAN DO Descriptors.Lesson Seeds:Lesson seeds are ideas for the standards that can be used to build a lesson. Lesson seeds are not meant to be all-inclusive, nor are they substitutes for instruction. This lesson seed provides a compelling question and a bank of sources to use to drive an inquiry based lesson or a potential Evidence Based Argument Set (EBAS). When developing lessons from these seeds, teachers must consider the needs of all learners. Once you have built your lesson from the lesson seed, teachers are encouraged to post the lesson that has emerged from this lesson seed and share with others. 

Understanding the differences between the dot and cross products. Created by Sal Khan.

Sal shows how to determine the magnetic force between two currents going in opposite directions. Created by Sal Khan.

Sal explains the difference between liquids and gasses (both fluids). He then starts a calculation of the work done on a liquid in a U-shaped container. Created by Sal Khan.

In this activity, students study the range of colors in a visible light spectrum created from either a glass prism or holographic diffraction grating. This activity is in unit 2 of the "Space-Based Astronomy" guide that contains background information, worksheets, assessment activities, extensions, and alignment to national education standards.

This course provides an introduction to the study of environmental phenomena that exhibit both organized structure and wide variability—i.e., complexity. Through focused study of a variety of physical, biological, and chemical problems in conjunction with theoretical models, we learn a series of lessons with wide applicability to understanding the structure and organization of the natural world. Students also learn how to construct minimal mathematical, physical, and computational models that provide informative answers to precise questions.
This course is appropriate for advanced undergraduates. Beginning graduate students are encouraged to register for 12.586 (graduate version of 12.086). Students taking the graduate version complete different assignments.

In this activity, students construct three-dimensional models from terrain information provided by two-dimensional topographic maps. This will allow them to visualize how changes in elevation over a certain distance can be represented on a flat piece of paper that can be folded up and tucked away. Each group is responsible for constructing a model of Mount St. Helens 'before' and 'after', a depression, a stream, and a hill. Discussion questions related to the different representations are also included.

Students learn the physical properties of sound, how it travels and how noise impacts human health—including the quality of student learning. They learn different techniques that engineers use in industry to monitor noise level exposure and then put their knowledge to work by using a smart phone noise meter app to measure the noise level at an area of interest, such as busy roadways near the school. They devise an experimental procedure to measure sound levels in their classroom, at the source of loud noise (such as a busy road or construction site), and in between. Teams collect data using smart phones/tablets, microphones and noise apps. They calculate wave properties, including frequency, wavelength and amplitude. A PowerPoint® presentation, three worksheets and a quiz are provided.

In this video segment from Cyberchase, the CyberSquad and Digit construct a physical profile of the person who kidnapped Choocroca, a giant cybercrocodile.

Students will identify minerals based on their physical properties and select one of the minerals to research and determine its use(s) in manufacturing

This course explores the applications of physics (Newtonian, statistical, and quantum mechanics) to fundamental processes that occur in celestial objects. The list of topics includes Main-sequence Stars, Collapsed Stars (White Dwarfs, Neutron Stars, and Black Holes), Pulsars, Supernovae, the Interstellar Medium, Galaxies, and as time permits, Active Galaxies, Quasars, and Cosmology. Observational data is also discussed.

The theory of special relativity, originally proposed by Albert Einstein in his famous 1905 paper, has had profound consequences on our view of physics, space, and time. This course will introduce you to the concepts behind special relativity including, but not limited to, length contraction, time dilation, the Lorentz transformation, relativistic kinematics, Doppler shifts, and even so-called “paradoxes.”

Investigating a waterwheel illustrates to students the physical properties of energy. They learn that the concept of work, force acting over a distance, differs from power, which is defined as force acting over a distance over some period of time. Students create a model waterwheel and use it to calculate the amount of power produced and work done.

This video explains the potential of a capacitor and how they function in a circuit. By David Santo Pietro.

Sal uses the molar version of the ideal gas law to solve for the number of moles in a gas. He also shows how to convert this answer into number of molecules using Avogadro's number. Created by Sal Khan.