PKG Academic Courses
Spring 2026
MAS.S70 Community-Driven Innovation
Wednesdays, 10 am – 1 pm| E15-466
Instructors: Ila Krishna Kumar, Vippy Yee, Alison Hynd, Raechel Walker
How do you co-create new technologies, programs, and policies with communities who are historically excluded from decision-making processes? What does it look like to iteratively shape a project around the needs of your community partners? How do you creatively accomplish research goals in the process of creating outputs that communities actually find valuable? This half-semester course is designed to support students who are interested in or actively engaged in community-driven innovation projects. Through critical examination of participatory design frameworks, case studies, and conversations with practitioners, the course will demystify the process of co-creating with community partners. Students will also be guided through reflective and future-thinking exercises to help them clarify their positionality, scope of work, and next steps. For students who are just beginning to engage community partners, this course will help them build a roadmap for their project and provide them with a toolkit for their work. For students who are already working closely with community groups, the course will provide space to reflect and think critically and expansively about the future. The course will intentionally create space for community building and peer-sharing to create a community of practice that all students can turn to for support, guidance, and inspiration even after the course ends.
The course is primarily targeted toward graduate students, but interested undergraduate students may also apply.
If interested, please complete the pre-registration form or reach out to ilak@media.mit.edu or pkgcenter@mit.edu with any questions.
Fall 2025
SP.259 Pathways to Social Justice at MIT and Beyond
Wednesdays, 1-2:30pm in 1-134
Taught by: V. Yee
This course explores student pathways to support social change and social justice efforts within the greater Boston region and how students can be agents of change throughout their lives. Students are introduced to ethical, reciprocal, and community-informed approaches to creating social change through readings, lectures, class discussions, critical reflection, and direct service experiences with local community organizations. This course also aims to create a supportive community for undergraduate students to build a network of thoughtful MIT stakeholders dedicated to creating social good in the world. Subject offered by the PKG Public Service Center. Subject can count toward the 6-unit discovery-focused credit limit for first-year students.
Questions? Feel free to reach out to us at pkgcenter@mit.edu, or connect with one of our friendly team members for more information!
IAP 2025
SP.256 Informed Philanthropy in Theory and Action
This IAP class can be taken as a not-for-credit experiential learning opportunity by MIT students, alumni, and employees, or as an undergraduate 2-credit class.
Explores the potential and pitfalls of philanthropy as a mechanism for social change, culminating with the class granting $7000 to local community agencies. Students analyze the work of non-profits to address the challenges and opportunities facing MIT’s neighboring communities, with particular focus on community representation, equity, and social justice. We will especially consider organizations that emphasize work with historically marginalized communities. The class culminates with students making a group decision on how the class will disperse $7000 to local non-profits. The class is designed to cultivate a sense of community, often over snacks and deliberative dialogue. Each session, we’ll learn and apply group decision making methods that will help in making the final funding allocations. Through class discussion and supporting materials, students examine the interaction between philanthropy and social change, including the role of philanthropists past and present in shaping social change. Subject can count toward the 9-unit discovery-focused credit limit for first-year students.
Intrigued? Use this form to express interest and we’ll follow-up to confirm participation.
Taught by: A. Hynd and V.Yee
Tuesdays and Wednesdays over IAP, noon-1:00pm in 8-119.
Student Testimonials:
“This class was a great complement to my other coursework in the sense that we were looking at human-focused issues and bringing emotion and heart into our work rather than just solving equations or writing programs. It brought me back to my community and reminded me why I wanted to come to MIT in the first place: to make a tangible impact on someone’s life. Unlike my other classes, I knew my work was going toward more than tests or essays — I felt I, along with my classmates and instructors, was working toward a real positive difference in my community.“
“This class provided a great opportunity to give away [real money] in a thoughtful way. It really embodied ‘mens et manus’ as we learned about different forms of philanthropy and how to go about selecting and evaluating organizations and decision processes. It was a very collaborative and social experience as we worked as a team to make our decisions, learning by doing.”
Read more student testimonials in this blog post!
Community-Engaged Courses PKG Supports
1.063/1.631/HST.537/2.25 Fluids and Diseases
Designed for students with quantitative training who are interested to explore applications of mathematics, physics and fluid dynamics to infectious diseases and health; and for students in epidemiology, environmental health, ecology, medicine, and systems modeling seeking to understand physical and spatial modeling, and the role of fluid dynamics and physical constraints on infectious diseases and pathologies. The first part of the class reviews modeling in epidemiology and highlights concepts of spatial modeling and heterogeneity. The remainder highlights multi-scale dynamics, the role of fluids and fluid physics in physiology and pathology in the context of infectious diseases. The class activities entail activities aimed at integrating applied learning with theoretical concepts discussed in lectures and covered in problem sets. Students taking graduate version complete additional assignments.
Within this course, students collaborate with community partners in the Boston area, engaging in student-led projects centered on themes such as education accessibility, sustainability, food security, healthcare access, and additional areas of focus. Moreover, the PKG Public Service Center provides opportunities for students to extend their project involvement into the summer through PKG fellowships.
Tuesdays and Thursdays, 7-8:30pm in 1-246
Taught by: L. Bourouiba
6.9000 Engineering for Impact
A collaboration with the PKG Center in partnership with Miami-Dade County Department of Transportation and Public Works.
In this class we’ll integrate our EECS knowledge from core subjects to design complete systems that incorporate hardware and software. So we’ll learn, in the EECS context, how to develop requirements and specifications for a system, then use those specifications to partitions systems into subsystems, how to assign functionality to hardware or software, how to manage data and energy, and so on.
To guide our learning, we’ll undertake a large-scale group project to develop a complete system to meet the needs of a partner institution (we’ll reveal the partner once the class starts). We expect to design and build real systems that really encompass the full stack: from sensors and electronics, to microcontrollers with embedded firmware, to a server system that integrates data across multiple sensor systems, to a data dashboard to visualize the data.
We’ll also use a guided project — where we’ll design/build a HW/SW system — in the first half of the term to learn about many of the fundamentals and skills that we’ll apply to the group project.
In the course of doing all this, you’ll learn some practical skills, like how to do PCB design; how to design/draw/3Dprint enclosures, how to set up a server machine, web server, and db from scratch. You’ll also learn how to evaluate different technologies to attain a functional goal, and how to work in teams (we’re partnering with faculty in Sloan on this bit). You’ll have an authentic experience to talk about with potential employers, and confidence that comes from designing & building a real system.
STS.014 Embodied Education: Past, Present, Future
Fall 2025: Tues/Thurs 11am-12:30pm
Instructors: Professor Jennifer Light (jslight@mit.edu), Professor Carrie Sampson Moore
A growing body of scientific and educational research makes clear that people think with their bodies – not just their brains – and that finding ways to move during the school day can enhance student learning. This class builds on MIT’s longstanding tradition of experiential education to explore the possibilities of a future for K-college education in which physical activity and academic subjects are combined.
In Fall 2025 our academic focus is high school math, in collaboration with several local and national organizations: the Cambridge STEAM Initiative, the Young People’s Project and the National Math Foundation. Your assignments in this course will be for more than just a grade – you’ll be developing movement-based lessons on a range of topics in Algebra 1, to be shared with educators in Cambridge and around the US! During the first half of the semester, we’ll be exploring movement and learning as a general topic. In the second half we’ll shift our attention to focus on movement games. Project work will culminate in the Algebra Olympics in the last full week of class.