My First Class at MIT

I’m sitting here in my first class at MIT.

2.003J

If you were at MIT you’d understand this. I can deconstruct it for you but it’s still mostly a mystery to me. The number before the decimal point indicates the department, 2=Mechanical Engineering. The number and letters after the decimal point indicate the course, 003J=Dynamics and Control. Here’s where the system gets to be a bit less clear. Really the system should mean the course number is 03 or even 003. I’m not sure what the J really refers to.

For most at MIT that’s enough to communicate everything they need about the class.

For everyone else, I’m sitting in an introductory dynamics and control class in mechanical engineering.

Why am I here?

I’ve been working with Prof. Kim Vandiver on some of his pedagogical approaches mediated with educational technologies. I ask Kim if I could sit in on his classes to see how his approaches are working. Plus I wanted to see what it was like to be an MIT student.

Kim’s doing a few things differently than most MIT faculty.

• Students are encouraged to work together on problem sets; but are expected to turn in their own work.
• Students are “required” to answer an online survey, just after their problem sets are posted, to provide quick feedback to the instructors. Basically, at first glance, do they think they can start answering the problems; do they have enough information to frame the question. If not, where/how are they unsure of how to begin? This is intended to help the faculty provide additional support during the recitation sections to clarify the material and concepts. (This is the part I’ve been helping them with. Surveys in Stellar, MIT’s learning management system, are frankly a bear–or insert your favorite “b” word here.)

On the engineering side, Kim uses an interesting vector notation. His position vectors include a notation of to and from so the position vector, r, between points a and b is: r_b/a. Oh yeah, the way he draws his r’s is kinda funky–they look like an indeterminate greek character. I’m pretty sure when I took this subject the first time, I woulda just used r₁ (and taken care of the relationships between points a and b in the diagram).