Spark! Spring 2009
Course Catalog
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| Humanities | [Deprecated] Math & Computer Science |
| [Deprecated] Science | Miscellaneous |
This is the Spark 2009 Course Catalog. If you'd like to learn more about Spark, please visit the Spark Homepage. If you're trying to sign up for Spark, please see Spark's Registration Page.
We hope you enjoy Spark 2009! If you have any questions about the classes below, feel free to contact their teachers directly, or e-mail us at esp-spark@mit.edu.
We will do our best to ensure that all classes run as scheduled; but we do occasionally have to re-schedule or cancel a class, due to resource issues, family emergencies, or the like. Should this happen, we'll let you know as soon as possible and give you the chance to select an alternative class.
Arts
Lights!
Action!
Ever wanted to make a movie? Wondered how directors create such complicated plot lines and then manage to shoot all those frames? Do you have a story to tell?
This crash course in videography will go over storyboarding, shooting skills, and maybe even some editing! We will be working from an idea, to a storyboard, to frame planning, and finally to shooting. Afterwards, we will screen our short films (5 minutes or less) to one another and participate in a short critique session.
Please be prepared with an idea for a very short film. Participation is absolutely necessary so be ready to talk, use the camera, and get into the spirit.
Prerequisites
None! Just an open mind to drawing, acting, and using mad camera skills.
Prerequisites
Some experience folding origami (this class is not suited for beginners). Patience with folding the same thing many times in a row. It will be worth it!
We'll talk about what makes a good cartoon, looking at classic examples from yesteryear to today, including newspaper strips and web comics. Using the inspiration from the masters, we'll explore some cartooning of our own, with some group and individual activities. If all goes well, you'll take some great ideas for comics home with you.
Take note: This is not really a learn-to-draw class. It's more than a write-the-perfect-joke class. What we're really interested in here is how a comic operates: characterization, dialogue, pacing, interactions between visual/text, and how all these features contribute to a successful cartoon.
Because we take the funnies seriously.
Prerequisites
None, other than an interest in cartooning. It would be great if you bring an example or two of comics that you really enjoy, though not necessary.
Prerequisites
Familiarity with reading music (preferably both bass and treble clef), scales, key signatures, and intervals.
Prerequisites
- A love for music - A good sense of rhythm and beat
Lights!
Action!
Ever wanted to make a movie? Wondered how directors create such complicated plot lines and then manage to shoot all those frames? Do you have a story to tell?
This crash course in videography will go over storyboarding, shooting skills, and maybe even some editing! We will be working from an idea, to a storyboard, to frame planning, and finally to shooting. Afterwards, we will screen our short films (5 minutes or less) to one another and participate in a short critique session.
Please be prepared with an idea for a VERY short film. Participation is absolutely necessary so be ready to talk, use the camera, and get into the spirit.
Continue this tradition by learning to link metal rings to make delicate jewelry or the most awesome shirt you've ever seen.
Prerequisites
Chainmail needs a bit of patience.
Prerequisites
An interest in anime or art, an attention span. Minimal art software (not necessarily Photoshop) familiarity is suggested by not required.
Engineering
Prerequisites
Some basic calculus is recommended.
Prerequisites
Basic physics. Be able to define and identify forces, work, energy.
Prerequisites
Knowledge of basic physics. Be able to define and identify forces, work, energy, etc. Taking my first class is not necessary for this class although they are related.
Then join me for a practical class in Rocket Science for Middle Schoolers! We'll cover:
- The physics of rocket flight
- Rocket design ("Space Systems Engineering")
- Applications in space exploration
- A practical demonstration of a model rocket -- that YOU are going to build and launch!
If you like the sound of all that, consider signing up for my 9-week HSSP course "ASTRONAUT SCHOOL for Middle Schoolers": you'll learn all about space survival skills, building moonbases and journeying to Mars, the history and future of spaceflight, and even discovering alien life on other planets!
A headphone amplifier uses the same type of circuit building blocks as almost everything else, and it might noticeably improve the sound quality of your headphones. I'll teach you some basic ideas about how circuits work, and demonstrate how to build and test them using equipment at the MIT Edgerton Center. Each of my brave students will receive a kit of electronic parts and documentation explaining the operation of the circuit, step by step. Hopefully, you'll all finish and take home working headphone amplifiers.
IMPORTANT: Unless you are receiving financial aid, a $10 lab fee (to be turned in at the beginning of the class) will be required to cover the cost of the components.
Humanities
Prerequisites
Interest in words and language.
Prerequisites
Enthusiasm, imagination, love of language.
Prerequisites
Curiosity
Prerequisites
Some familiarity with the Japanese alphabets (hiragana and katakana) would be very useful.
Students will learn about violent crimes, job and educational requirements, arrest procedures, the cycle of crime, and finger printing analysis. Students will be able to analyze their own fingerprints and patterns and participate in classroom role plays.
Topics of discussion:
• Team building
• Booking
• Arrests and Pat Searches
• Crime and Trends
Prerequisites
Students should be mature and able to handle topics related to criminal justice, such as robbery, assault, rape and murder --- Uniform Crime Report (violent crimes), which we will briefly discuss.
Skills you will learn in this class include
* how to tell whether two languages are related, just by looking at them
* how to re-construct languages that have been extinct for hundreds or thousands of years, just by looking at related languages
Prerequisites
This is an introductory course. If you already know a lot about Linguistics, you will probably find it uninteresting. Explore something new instead!
Come to this crash course on banking and investments. Find out what Wall Street does and how what they do effects you and your family.
Lastly, we'll look at the lives of bankers and traders to help you decide if a career on Wall Street is right for you.
If your brain is twisting in agony from the onslaught of questions, take this course! We will unravel the mysteries of grammar and take a look at diagramming sentences.
Prerequisites
A willingness to listen.
Come to Auction Action to learn the theory behind the bidding process. You'll learn some bidding strategy and will be able to try your hand against your classmates for a variety of small prizes, snacks, and candy.
Course Webpage : http://web.media.mit.edu/~reedm/H2227/
But what is it that the kid steals when he downloads a song, and from whom does he steal it? We would like to think that it is the music itself, but the downloaded file just contains a bunch of numbers that the computer uses to make sound. And why is the fine so high? Surely, the song doesn't cost thousands of dollars, especially when a CD with a dozen of them costs just a few bucks.
In this class, we will discuss the theory behind copyright laws, and what the court cases and battles that go into them are. We will also discuss some of the interesting implications of these laws (such as the fact that 80-year-old Mickey Mouse cartoons are still under copyright).
(Note: This class will be a re-run of the Splash 2008 class. If you took that one, you probably will be bored).
By the end of this course, you’ll seem like an educated Roman elite with your vast knowledge of numbers, letters, and basic greetings, just in case you end up in ancient Rome.
Prerequisites
None. Toga optional.
It turns out that scales arise from some simple mathematical rules about when notes sound harmonious together. This class will show you how the Western musical scale arises from those rules, and how with some different choices we could have ended up with 5, 19, 22, or even 53 notes. You'll hear what music sounds like on unfamiliar scales, and even get the opportunity to play a piano keyboard with 19 notes in each octave.
Prerequisites
This class will make use of basic math. You should understand how to multiply fractions and raise numbers to a power. It will also help if you are familiar with musical intervals -- for example, what thirds and fifths sound like.
In this class, we will discuss how to narrate the ordinary moments of your life in extraordinary ways.
If you have any work you would like to bring with you, like a blog entry or a rough draft of a college essay, feel free to do so. Otherwise, this class is open to all age and experience levels.
These questions may not seem metaphorical, but they are.
Metaphors: we not only encounter them in the arts but also think with them. Find out how metaphors are described by Conceptual Metaphor Theory and how we encounter them in communication and reasoning.
Prerequisites
Be willing to plan and do something about it all!
If you want to learn more about paradoxes of democracy, please come to the instructor's other class on apportionment (instead of elections) as well!
Prerequisites
Comfort with arithmetic; interest in voting, political science, decision-making, and/or economics
If you want to learn more about paradoxes of democracy, please come to the instructor's other class on ELECTIONS (instead of APPORTIONMENT) as well!
Prerequisites
Comfort with arithmetic; interest in voting, political science, decision-making, and/or economics.
Despite its fairly strict and restrictive form, (14 lines, iambic pentameter) sonnets have a myriad of styles in historical and modern poetry.
This class is designed to show you how sonnets have grown and developed over the past centuries into a diverse and powerful form that knows no bounds.
We'll spend the first hour learning how to read and talk about a few classic sonnets to ground you in the sonnet tradition. The second hour will be dedicated to discussing you the myriad paths sonnets have taken since then.
Come ready to think. Come ready to talk.
Take this class to find out the answer to these questions, and learn some of the basics about naming.
In this class we'll explore how the short-term effects of events after 1960 have shaped the current state of the world.
[Deprecated] Math & Computer Science
What does that mean? Why do we care about formal systems anyway? And what's so cool about the proof itself that there's a Spark class about it?
If you're curious and motivated, and ready to learn a whole lot in an awfully short span of time, this class is for you! Along the way, we'll explore ideas of truth and provability, self-referential statements (such as "this statement is unprovable"), how math and meaning go hand in hand, and perhaps (if we have time) learn what number theory has to do with whether computers can think.
The more you know about formal logic to begin with, the easier this class will be for you, but anyone is welcome to attend.
Prerequisites
A little familiarity with mathematical logic. If you don't know anything about logic, don't worry - gloss over the first half of the wikipedia article on first-order logic (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-order_logic) and you'll be fine. We'll review it all in class anyway.
Prerequisites
Fluency in high school algebra and geometry, "precalculus" is a plus, familiarity with physics will help.
First you'll learn the basics of programming in Java, one of the world's most popular languages. Second, you'll learn about interactive computer art, including some basic principles of visual design.
Should be lots of fun! No programming experience required (and in fact, you may find the first bit of the class boring if you already know programming, but feel free to come anyway!)
Bring a laptop if you'd like to follow along.
Beautiful, no?
This class will dive headfirst into the key concepts of Fractals including symmetry, expressible infinity, and chaos. Specifically, we will take an in depth look at the Sierpinski Triangle (briefly covering the difference between fractal dimension and topological dimension), the Lorenz Water Wheel (illustrating the ideas of the Butterfly Effect and Strange Attractors), and the well-known Mandelbrot Set. If you want to see mathematics from a completely alien perspective, this class is for you.
Prerequisites
Differentiation and Integration of Friendly Functions I or familiarity with differentiation and integration.
Prerequisites
Little to no experience. (You should not sign up for this class if you already know how to program. I would like the class to start off on approximately the same level.)
While you play your video games, a chip inside the computer works hard to render 3d scenes as fast as 60 times a second. Starting from only coloring individual pixels, it is possible to build up the ability to render something as complex as an alien (or a teapot). This class will explore how this is done.
Note: This is neither an art nor a video game class.
We will show you how to model real-life problems and find optimal solutions of your own!
Prerequisites
Algebra II.
Ever wanted to learn Scheme? Have you heard of functional programming, but never learned any functional languages?
Come to our class, and we’ll teach you the basics of Scheme, and how to learn more.
Prerequisites
Some exposure to programming, but not to Scheme.
Prerequisites
Familiarity with algebra and basic probability theory.
Well, you can't prove anything about numbers if you don't know what they really are. How do we know that mathematical constructions actually work? What basis tells us that even something as simple as addition makes sense --- how do you even define it? What could it possibly mean to take something like $$\pi^{\sqrt{2}}$$? Well, the numbers can be built out of something much, much simpler. You can work your way right up from almost nothing to the full complexity of the real numbers. Come and find out how a mathematician thinks about a concept you might have thought was simple.
Prerequisites
This will be a very challenging course, but not like the mathematics you see in school: it won't be about memorizing formulas or lots of calculations. This class is for people who like and are good at dealing with abstract concepts and logical deduction.
Prerequisites
Basic Algebra, Geometry
Prerequisites
This class is meant for people who don't know Scheme (or other lisp variants). However, you should have some minimum programming experience - you should know what if statements and functions are.
Two-sided matching markets abound; examples include the marriage, college admissions, and employment markets. In this class, we introduce stable matching, the solution concept for these markets. We then discuss the motivation for and application of stable matching mechanisms.
We'll blaze through typical ways of using OSX to do what you want. We'll learn how to avoid common mistakes recent switchers make. And we'll learn a few neat tricks that others around you might not even know about!
Prerequisites
Some previous computer exposure is helpful.
How to make the right choice… in order to win money, of course. A bit of intro math, and then some situations in which the right setup makes most people /very/ likely to slip up.
Second section of the class: How to definitely Win Money off your friends
Not a gambler? – this isn’t cheating per se, it’s simply leading your opponent to assume that they have a chance…
Prerequisites
Familiarity with elementary probability theory and complex arithmetic will be assumed. (In particular, no prior knowledge of quantum mechanics is necessary.)
These are questions that can be answered with integral calculus, the study of continuous sums. We will briefly review limits, continuity, and differentiability. Then, we will go on to define the integral as a limit of Riemann sums, and prove the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus.
Techniques for integration will be introduced as time permits.
Prerequisites
Two years of algebra, one year of geometry, and precalculus are necessary. Knowledge of differential calculus (derivatives, slope, rate of change) will be extremely useful. This course can serve as a preview to integral calculus, a review of it, or even just a fun two-hour seminar!
Note: This is NOT a web design course. Though I will talk about information that is useful to know for a web designer, the purpose will be to discuss the inner workings of the web. As such, you will probably not leave the class knowing how to make your own web site.
Prerequisites
You should have basic experience with using computers and the Web. If the idea of opening a Web page and clicking on a link is not foreign to you, you should be fine.
[Deprecated] Science
We'll take a whirlwind tour of precision timekeeping devices from sun dials to the upcoming generation of optical atomic clocks.
Prerequisites
Know the connection between time and frequency. Understanding the scientific notation for very small numbers (like $$10^{-17}$$) will also be helpful.
Prerequisites
You should have some familiarity with the nervous system and how neurons work.
We will begin with only two observations. First, the relativistic nature of light: you can’t catch up to a light beam – it will always move away from you at speed c. Second, our observations of the force between two charges described by $$ \frac{q_1 q_2}{r^2} $$: $$ q_1 $$ and $$ q_2 $$ being the magnitude of the two charges, and r being the distance between them. From these two observations, we will DERIVE the explanation of everything else. Aka, the world will unfold before you and it will be beautiful.
Prerequisites
All this said, and there being no “hidden prerequisites,” the world will need to unfold before you /very/ quickly. I basically just claimed that I would introduce all of single-variable calculus and about half of multivariable calculus in the first hour of class – which I believe is an attainable goal – but this class will be rigorous, will be extremely intense, and will require the full two hours.
Prerequisites
No prior knowledge needed. Only a desire to learn something new about our Universe.
Come prepared with your own questions, and we'll do our best to answer them!
Prerequisites
I will not assume that you have any specific knowledge, but the discussion will be more interesting if you have had an introductory physics course already or know your way around electronics.
In this course, we will look at the physiological basis of vision and the psychological basis of perception and see how the two mesh to give us visual illusions.
Prerequisites
Single variable calculus is required. Multivariable calculus and high school mechanics will not hurt.
Prerequisites
None, but we will move quickly as to cover a huge amount of material. Come prepared to be focused and responsive for the full two hour period. Bring questions.
Class will be from 6-7, running until the end of Spark. From 7-9 will be open observing; all are welcome to observe! Warm clothes are a must for all attendees, including gloves and a hat; a good rule for observing is to dress as if the weather is 20 F colder than it actually is.
If you are late and/or want to come to open observing, come to 37-292 and/or have Spark personnel call the teachers.
*MIT observing tradition -- we'll tell you about it!
Prerequisites
An interest in astronomy and a willingness to learn! Make sure to bring warm clothes.
Why? Because prions, the infectious proteins that cause Mad Cow Disease, break the fundamental genetic dogma of biology.
How do prions work? Where are prions found? Why do prions exist? What do prions have to do with cannibalism? We'll attempt to answer all these questions and more during this class.
Prerequisites
High school biology or an equivalent understanding of genetics, proteins and cell structure.
Miscellaneous
Rob Speer, a Wikipedia admin, will answer these questions and more. This class will make you a more informed user of Wikipedia, and show you how you can contribute to it yourself as well.
Prerequisites
Some computer skills.
Prerequisites
Note that we will be using the same route we used during Splash.
This section (take!) will focus on how to avoid breaking the law when you use other peoples' work and incorporate it into your own.
This section (create!) will focus on how to protect your rights when you share content you've created.
This class will be led by a student who studied abroad in Austria and a student who studied abroad in the Czech Republic.
Prerequisites
Ability to handle kitchen implements without causing fire / loss of limbs / major blood loss.
Prerequisites
You may attend this class more than once; however, if you travel back in time to attend the class with your past self, we request that you refrain from damaging the timestream on MIT property, as multitemporal lawsuits cause all sorts of legal headaches.
Ever want to play Quidditch? Now's your chance!
Come learn how to play the game that's taking the Muggle world by storm. You may even get the chance to meet real live Quidditch players. Come and play or just watch.
Prerequisites
shoes and clothing appropriate for running and physical activities. Wands optional.
This is not a formal class, just a time to give suggestions and hear how others with food allergies handle social situations and nutrition. Or just hang out and eat lunch. Bring your own bag lunch, we don't recommend sharing food at this meeting.
Prerequisites
This course will turn beginners into ninja knot masters. If you're already a ninja knot master, you will be bored.
Want to get into one of these?
MIT Admissions Blogger and CollegeConfidential.com veteran with over 1,600 posts shares some insights (disclaimer: my opinions are strictly personal and do not represent the official positions of any college =p).
Michelle Bentivegna: MIT Sophomore in Civil Engineering and Political Science. She can answer questions on history and current politics, as well as explain why Boston's sanitation system is run by the Mafia.
Chris Kennedy: Mathematician, Physicist, Chemist, currently an MIT Junior. You should ask him why the Pauli Exclusion Principle is cool.
Roshini Zachariah: MIT Senior double majoring in Music and Biological Engineering. You should ask her about her four years of experience in MIT bio labs -- but she can't answer anything that's classified.
These three MIT students will do their best to answer questions on anything academic.
Prerequisites
Patience and enthusiasm! Mao can be a very frustrating game, and if getting punished for unexplained and seemingly arbitrary reasons annoys you, you will probably not enjoy the game. As a warning, if you get frustrated and start making the game less fun for others, you will be asked to leave. Familiarity with the game of UNO will be slightly helpful but is not at all necessary.
Put your creative thinking skills to the test in this class, where you'll discuss strategies and methods of surviving apocalypses! Come unassuming, leave thinking about hypotheticals you never thought you would.
The most awesomest sport ever invented!!!!!
Come and ruck it out with the MIT Women's Rugby Club.
Prerequisites
Any and all are welcome.
Money design is an integral part of preserving our history, and this class invites you to explore the story contained in US and international money.
If not for anything else, come and see 100,000,000,000 dollars live. :D (and get a free souvenir!)
Prerequisites
Curiosity and an open mind.
Prerequisites
You must be MATURE. You must be NON-DISRUPTIVE during class. You must come with an OPEN MIND.
NOTE: Since this event is run by a separate student group at MIT, you will need a separate permission slip for it. Please print out the form found at http://web.mit.edu/zehender/Public/PatrolPermissionSheet.txt, have your parent/guardian sign it and bring it with you. You will not be allowed into the class otherwise.
Prerequisites
Make sure you bring a signed copy of the permission slip (http://web.mit.edu/zehender/Public/PatrolPermissionSheet.txt) with you!
Put your creative thinking skills to the test in this class, where you'll discuss strategies and methods of surviving apocalypses! Come unassuming, leave thinking about hypotheticals you never thought you would.
This short, interactive class will teach you some simple bargaining strategies and help you get over your shyness about bargaining.
Prerequisites
You need to know how to solve a Rubik's Cube (though not necessarily fast).
