Teal is Not the Color of MIT’s Introductory Physics Classroom…

Click here to receive your FREE subscription to Campus Technology

Home > Teal is Not the Color of MIT’s Introductory Physics Classroom…

Current News

Teal is Not the Color of MIT’s Introductory Physics Classroom…

9/15/2004

By Terry Calhoun

Thanks to some very dedicated staff and faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) last week, I and about 40 other attendees of the National Learning Information Infrastructure (NLII) fall focus workshop on "Learning Space Design for the 21st Century" enjoyed an intimate tour of more than a half a dozen of the newer formal learning spaces at MIT.

As my colleague Steve Ehrmann of the TLT Group, who presented to the group said, first of one space and then of others: "I attended lectures in this room 30 years ago and it was nothing like this." Steve, an alumnus of MIT, kept up the refrain throughout the evening. According to Steve, everything looks the same on the outside (except the Stata Center, see below), but the insides of the classrooms have been transformed. I was impressed. Can I please go back to school?

At MIT, like on many modern campuses, the architectural and landscape heritage is mostly preserved--which sustains the campus brand, image, and feel. Yet the core mission of the campus--the learning and research that g'es on--is supported to the utmost by appropriately-designed interior learning spaces enhanced with current technologies.

There is a little bit of exterior change, though. The juxtaposition of old and new was nowhere more striking than during our stroll down the street past the industrial-age architecture of the Wright Brothers' Wind Tunnel and then into the courtyard in front of what is currently the boldest of new campus buildings, the playful Stata Center [image above]. I could imagine that some wild nanotechnology bugs had gotten loose from a lab and was causing campus buildings to mutate into a strange titanium, brick, and red and yellow enamel landscape of non-intuitive shapes. Here's a link to a multimedia tour of the Stata Center.

We visited a set of language learning labs and classrooms, the redesigned "aero-astro" department (planned from vision to implementation by the nation's "chief rocket scientist"), a completely adaptable large classroom inside the Stata Center, and several other formal learning spaces. The dedication of the MIT staff and faculty showed by taking us on this tour, which took place after regular working hours, was even more impressive than you might think because this was at the end of the first day of classes of the academic year.

Of all the interior spaces we saw, I found the classroom for the introductory physics class, the TEAL classroom, of the TEAL (Technology Enabled Active Learning) Project to be the most interesting. During the semester, the room services 500 students in introductory physics, never in a group larger than about 100 students at a time. Remember your introductory physics lectures? You probably sat in rigid rows, too close to other students for comfort, all facing forward to the sage on the stage who was writing on endless blackboards with chalk. There'll be no more of that in physics at MIT for freshmen. Instead, there is the most humane classroom I've ever seen.