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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 undergraduate offering. At the end of every spring semester, the course culminates in a robotics showdown, which draws hundreds of spectators from across campus and beyond. The winner achieves lifelong bragging rights, entering MIT Valhalla while notching one heck of a résumé bullet point.
Brandon McKenzie’s gaze slid to his lab mates seated around the table. A varsity swimmer who had competed in the Division III national championship as a first-year and would return to the championship series later in the semester, he had thus far maintained a perfect 5.0 GPA despite spending eighteen-plus hours per week in the pool. He was not used to the sense of falling behind, and yet there was no shaking the feeling that others were several lengths ahead of him in the race to build serious, competition-worthy robots. He had come to 2.007 with next to no practical robotics experience, and there were a few others in the same predicament—Amy Fang, for instance, at the other end of the table, and Josh Graves, Brandon’s roommate, teammate, and all-around co-conspirator, at his right elbow. But then there were folks like Jordan Malone, seated directly across from Brandon, whose computer-aided-design prowess Winter would later describe as a “super power.” (And that wasn’t even the most impressive thing about him: Although he never brought it up unbidden, everyone knew that Malone, a short track speed skater, had brought home Olympic medals from Vancouver and Sochi, prior to enrolling at MIT at age thirty.) And there was Zhiyi Liang— Z, for short—a joyful mad-scientist-in-training who seemed to come to class every week having produced a new mechanical marvel in his downtime. Brandon expressed no animosity toward his fellow students; indeed, he would become the lab’s most reliable source of fist bumps and backslaps in the weeks to come. But then again, he didn’t feel any animosity toward his swimming teammates either, and that certainly didn’t stop him from trying to outswim them.
Winter doled out off-brand Arduinos: microcontrollers that would inform the movements of the class’s Mini-Mes today and, later, their full-fledged, competition-ready robots. That morning’s lecture had concerned the mechanics of brushed, direct-current motors, the simplest type of electric motor. Now, mere hours later, Winter was taking his students’ understanding of DC motors as given and demonstrating how they could be put to work. As Winter blasted through a series of reasonably complicated concepts, Brandon scrambled to take in his words while also adjusting his Mini-Me’s physical wiring and fiddling with his Arduino’s code on his laptop. He sensed he was in danger of sliding even further behind.
“I felt a little discouraged,” he said later. Although Arduino’s programming language, C++, was basically new to him, some of his classmates seemed to know it “like the back of their hand.” He was keeping up for the time being, but he knew that the moment his attention strayed he would find himself stranded. This course had a sink-or-swim quality to it that felt all too familiar. It was as though he’d been chucked into the deep end of a pool but didn’t yet know how to stay afloat. And although there were plenty of instructors looking on, telling him how to keep his head above water, it was up to him to apply that information in a way that actually worked.
Provoking that conceptual shift—from theory to practice, from inert to activated knowledge—is what 2.007, at its core, is all about. The course assumed its modern form in 1970, when a young professor named Woodie Flowers took the reins. In the decades that followed, as the beloved professor became a professor emeritus,...
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