Biomimetics is based on the belief that nature, at least at times, is a good engineer. Biomimesis is the scientific method of learning new principles and processes based on systematic study, observation and experimentation with live animals and organisms. This Freshman Advising Seminar on the topic is a way for freshmen to explore some of MIT’s richness and learn more about what they may want to study in later years.

This course focuses on feedback control mechanisms that living organisms implement at the molecular level to execute their functions, with emphasis on techniques to design novel systems with prescribed behaviors. Students will learn how biological functions can be understood and designed using notions from feedback control.

This subject deals primarily with kinetic and equilibrium mathematical models of biomolecular interactions, as well as the application of these quantitative analyses to biological problems across a wide range of levels of organization, from individual molecular interactions to populations of cells.

The aim of this course is to provide fundamental statistical concepts and tools relevant to the practice of summarizing, analyzing, and visualizing data. This course will build your knowledge of the fundamental principles of biostatistical inference. The course will focus on linear regression and generalized linear regression models. We will use a variety of examples and exercises from scientific, medical, and public health research.

Black feminist health science studies is a critical intervention into a number of intersecting arenas of scholarship and activism, including feminist health studies, contemporary medical curriculum reform conversations, and feminist technoscience studies. We argue towards a theory of Black feminist health science studies that builds on social justice science, which has as its focus the health and well-being of marginalized groups. Students will engage feminist science theories such as the linguistic metaphors of the immune system, the medicalization of race, and critiques of the sexual binary. We will use contemporary as well as historical moments to investigate the evolution of “scientific truth” and its impact on the U.S. cultural landscape.

Interdisciplinary survey of people of African descent that draws on the overlapping approaches of history, literature, anthropology, legal studies, media studies, performance, linguistics, and creative writing. This course connects the experiences of African-Americans and of other American minorities, focusing on social, political, and cultural histories, and on linguistic patterns.

The purpose of this template is to allow the user to unpack the National Core Arts Standards into task-specific or task-neutral learning targets that then can be used during instruction and/or within an assessment tool like a rubric.

The Unpacking Process:
1. Take a look at the performance standard* and pull out the nouns, or what students need to know.
2. Next pull out what students need to be able to do (the verbs).
3. Write learning targets or I can statements. When writing ask yourself, “What does this look like in student work?”

*Grade level Performance Standards or Indicators will need to be added to the template prior to the first step. This is a blank template.

BLOSSOMS stands for Blended Learning Science or Math Studies. It is a project sponsored by MIT LINC (Learning International Networks Consortium) a consortium of educators from around the world who are interested in using distance and e-Learning technologies to help their respective countries increase access to quality education for a larger percentage of the population.
BLOSSOMS Online

This course will help students in a university setting to prepare for projects with a problem-based learning approach in an international environment. It will support you to define your role as a student, give guidance for being a member of an international group of students, as well as for working on a research project or with companies. This version of the course is intended for students, but also for teachers who can use the materials fully or partly in their courses. This is also why most of the materials are available for download in editable formats. The course is developed as part of the Erasmus+ project EPIC.

This course will help teachers in a university setting to prepare for projects with a problem-based learning approach in an international context. It will support you to define your role as a supervisor or tutor, give guidance for remotely supervising an international group of students as well as for working with companies on joint projects. The materials are produced as part of the Erasmus+ project EPIC.

This course is for students wishing to explore blockchain technology’s potential use—by entrepreneurs and incumbents—to change the world of money and finance. The course begins with a review of Bitcoin and an understanding of the commercial, technical, and public policy fundamentals of blockchain technology, distributed ledgers, and smart contracts. The class then continues on to current and potential blockchain applications in the financial sector.

The objective of the Body & Mind Academy project is to create a program of the yearlong course supporting physical, social and intellectual activation of people 55+.

This program is directed to the professionals working with seniors and contains guide, web application and videos.

In this lesson, students will investigate how teenagers became a distinct demographic group with its own identity in the postwar years, and, in turn, how their influence helped push Rock and Roll into the mainstream. In so doing, they helped secure Rock and Roll's place as the most important popular music of the 20th century.

In this lesson, students will examine the emergence of the teen idols in the late 1950swith a particular focus on Dion and the Belmontsto understand how mainstream culture promoted the image of the "good citizen" teen during an era of increased anxiety surrounding youth culture. Students will listen to recordings of Dion and the Belmonts' "A Teenager in Love," as well as Dion's later recording "The Wanderer," in addition to viewing a 1958 instructional film outlining school dress codes, a 1953 trailer for The Wild One, a selection of teen magazines, and performances by Jerry Lee Lewis and Connie Francis.

In this lesson, students assume the role of entertainment industry professionals responsible for marketing a selection of movies from the early Rock and Roll era. Following an examination of trailers, posters, newspaper articles, and the Motion Picture Production Code of 1930, students will present to the class on the various stakeholders that helped shape the way Rock and Roll culture was introduced to mainstream movie audiences in the 1950s.

In this lesson we explore one song Chuck Berry's "Johnny B. Goode," released on Chess Records in 1958 and suggest several analytical frameworks in which one can deepen one's understanding of the song: using a listening template; using a timeline to understand a song's historical context; understanding Rock and Roll as a visual culture; understanding Rock and Roll as performance; understanding Rock and Roll as a literary form; and understanding the industry and technology of Rock and Roll. Of course, what we do with "Johnny B. Goode" can be done with any song. The objective is to understand a recording in the most complete way possible.

In this lesson, students will listen to examples of love songs from several musical styles and historical moments. The activities are designed to explore how music and lyrics work together to express different sentiments toward love and relationships.

This lesson focuses on the music through which those hardships were expressed and on the daily lives of southern blacks in the sharecropping era. It is structured around an imagined road trip through Mississippi. Students will "stop" in two places: Yazoo City, where they will learn about the sorts of natural disasters that periodically devastated already-struggling poor southerners, and Hillhouse, where they will learn about the institution of sharecropping. They will study a particular Country Blues song at each "stop" and examine it as a window onto the socioeconomic conditions of the people who created it. Students will create a scrapbook of their journey, in which they will record and analyze what they have learned about the difficulty of eking out a living in the age of sharecropping.

The repercussions of the Great Migration are far-reaching. Today, much of the restlessness and struggle that the Blues helped to articulate in the Migration era remains central in other forms of American music, including Hip Hop. In this lesson, students look to Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf as case studies that illustrate why African Americans left the South in record numbers and how communities came together in new urban environments, often around the sound of the Blues.

In this lesson, students will trace some of the technological developments that made the electric guitar possible. Using a variety of Internet sources, students will conduct research into some of the early models, including the hollow-bodied Gibson ES-150, introduced in 1936, and the Fender Telecaster, the first mass-marketed solid-body electric guitar, introduced in 1952, at the dawn of the Rock and Roll era. They will explore not only how these instruments transformed the Blues sound, but how they laid the groundwork for the development of the electric guitar as an essential Rock and Roll instrument.