Hi.
I'm Judy Cole, the executive vice president and CEO
of the MIT Alumni Association.
And I'm delighted to welcome you to this Web production
of the MIT Alumni Association.
Thank you for the invitation to be part of this panel.
And I want to welcome everyone back to MIT.
It's great to see you and have you be part
of this incredible weekend.
I hope you got your periodic tables that we're handing out.
And it says-- welcome to MIT, now you're in your element.
And so this is something that you understand very well.
I was late to come to MIT.
I've only been here for 14 years.
But when I got here, I made those periodic tables
for the incoming class.
Because when I got here, I had found my element.
I found the place where I really fit in.
So thank you for welcoming me to part of your community.
When President Reif was speaking earlier,
he was talking about our campaign,
a campaign for a better world.
And that probably resonates with many people here.
It resonates so, so much with me,
because the reason I'm here at MIT, the reason I'm here today,
is because I really believe in MIT's impact to make
the world a better place.
And we have so many opportunities
to do that at MIT.
We have it through this science and technology
we're developing.
We have it through the policy we're developing.
We have it through our fantastic undergraduate and graduate
students.
And if you had a chance to visit the tables outside,
there was one on DNA, one on making electronic circuits
with pencils, and one on making plasmotic materials out
of gold and silver.
Those were all run by fantastic MIT students.
Those were graduate students and post-docs in my lab,
as well as my own two boys, who are here in the audience today.
So I've been excited about the idea of making
the world a better place.
And as was mentioned before, we live in challenging times.
We live in a time of many opportunities right now.
And the opportunities that Raphael put forward
were water, clean water, food, energy, energy storage,
health care.
Now, I agree that all of these are tremendous opportunities
that we're currently addressing.
But I think equally as important is education.
It's because it's the kids that are five years old right now,
that are six years old right now, that
are in middle school, that are going
to have the opportunities to make the biggest
impact on the science and technology of the planet
to make this world a better place.
We're all working in our labs and around MIT
right now, seven days a week, on trying
to make these technologies and science as an approach
as a reality.
But it's really going to be left in the hands
of the next generation to be able to close the gap,
to make some of the biggest fundamental changes
in our planet.
And so a couple of years ago, I went to talk to President Reif,
and I said exactly this-- we're doing such a fantastic job
in EdX and OpenCourseWare at MIT.
And you heard about this really incredible new program
called the MicroMasters.
And this is a revolutionary idea.
This is the idea of, OK, let's offer MIT master's education
to everyone on the planet who wants to take it.
And anyone that does really well, let's
invite them here to MIT to finish it.
And I think that's a great idea.
But actually, I see another vision as well.
What if we open that up to every child in the world.
What if we said, every kindergartener,
every first grader, every middle school, every high schooler
in the world, well, why don't we open up MIT education to you?
And that's what I'm interested in.
I'm interested in taking the kinds
of hands-on, minds-on learning that we
do that's so fundamental to who we are at MIT
and offering them to a kindergartener,
offering them to a first-grader, offering them
to a second-grader, offering them so middle school kids
and high school kids, so everyone
can have the same kind of experience
that our undergraduates have at MIT,
our graduates have at MIT, which is the love of science,
the love of engineering, the creating something
with your own hands, and taking that, what you're creating
with your own hands, and making something
that can impact the world and make the world a better place.
And our MIT residential hands-on, minds-on program--
you might recognize some of these fantastic programs
that we already have.
We have very popular classes, like 2.007, our most famous
class at MIT of building.
We have D-labs, where we develop technologies
at the undergraduate level for the developing world.
I'd like to see that for every child in America.
I'd like to see that for every child in the world,
to have those same kinds of opportunity.
And people might say, well, at MIT,
we focus on undergraduates.
We're fantastic at educating undergraduate and graduate
students.
But I really think that we have a really vital role
to play in the education of possibility
for every child in the country.
And I think that we can have an impact on that.
And it was mentioned earlier, we already
have 120 programs that are grassroot programs at MIT that
are based on people, our undergraduates, our faculty,
our graduate students, who are reaching out to the community
to share their love of science and engineering,
and whatever their passions are.
And we're already doing a fantastic job.
But as part of our PK through 12 action group, which we call--
it's not an equilibrium group, it's an action group--
the idea is to be a catalyst, to be an active site,
to amplify what we're doing to make
it available for the world.
And that's my passion.
And this was a charge that Raphael put for the task force,
is to be bold, experimenting with ideas that
would both enhance the education of our students on campus
and that would allow, offer, a vision for education
for the world.
And I think that we're taking that very seriously,
because many of us feel that we have that
to share with the whole world.
And I hope that you enjoyed the hands-on experience.
I saw people walking around-- look,
I isolated DNA from a strawberry,
or I made these gold and silver nanoparticles.
Those experiments were all designed for kids,
for elementary school kids.
And the idea, to me, is almost everyone
in this group that's taken GIRs here
at some form and some stage at MIT,
our freshmen experience where we all take chemistry, biology,
physics, computer science, math classes together,
the idea that--
one of the ideas we're working with, I'm calling quantum
learning, is what if we take that first year MIT experience,
and what if we say, what if we wanted every child in America
to have the ability, to have the background,
to come to MIT if they wanted to,
no matter where they were from?
What if we took that experience, and we backed it down,
and said, OK, how would you teach a kindergartener,
prepare them for MIT and changing the world's most
addressing challenges?
How would you teach a first-grader or second-grader?
Can you back it out, and can you build it back up again?
And can you build it up in a way that is not only
learning deeply about STEM education science
and physics and math and biology,
but can you do it in a way that's
a hands-on so they can experiment,
so they can realize that they can, in fact, change the world?
Now, one particular project we had in my lab a couple of years
ago, we had a middle school teacher come in,
and we built a DNA amplification machine, a PCR machine,
a way of amplifying DNA.
And so my students always want the best instruments
in the lab.
I don't know.
My students are in the lab.
They can tell me how much they cost, maybe $10,000,
a way of taking just a small amount of DNA
and making copies of it, using enzymes and using temperature.
But we'd said, well, what if we could build one
for $50, not $10,000?
What if we could build one for $50?
And what if every third-grader in the country
could isolate DNA from a strawberry
or from another source and then make copies of it?
And so what we did was we built it using a light bulb.
We built, in Arduino, a microprocessor,
so that the kids could program it themselves,
and then integrated it with smartphones so you could run it
from your smartphone.
So all of this was for $50.
So what this would allow us to do
is to teach real biology, real biology that
is molecular biology, DNA technology, things that
could be useful in careers, but also things that
could be useful for individual health, people
to understand their own health and diagnostics.
And then we made it inexpensive.
And it was all designed by students.
The first generation of it was actually built from Tupperware.
We built it from things you could buy in the grocery store.
So those are some of the kinds of things
that we're interested in, is the ability
to build inexpensive equipment for real science,
real cutting edge technology, and integrating
real science into it.
And one of the things that I've noticed,
and these are some different groups that I've
worked with around the country with kids,
is that people tend to underestimate children,
what they can actually learn and what they want to learn.
Maybe it's because their learning time is not
turned on right, or maybe it's not a game.
So I actually teach with dodgeballs,
different colored dodgeballs, because-- this goes
into the idea of play--
is because a dodgeball can represent a photon.
We play semi-conductor dodge ball.
We have a dodge ball, and it's a photon.
And if you take it, and you throw it
against a particular pattern you have on the wall,
you can hit a--
basically, activate a semiconductor molecule,
for example, is an idea.
We act out basically how to build a protein.
There's a lot of things you can do that are really
fun, interactive games.
You also sing songs about electrons.
I won't sing those right now.
But here's the $50 PCR machine that you can actually
use a light bulb to be able to amplify
your DNA sequence of choice.
And then we do all kinds of other kinds of fun things.
And you can see the kids that are so excited.
I was asked to give this lecture in an elementary school
not too long ago.
And it was for the whole school.
And they said, OK, we're going to have an all-school meeting.
And then you're going to come out and talk.
But we're going to have the kindergartners leave,
because we think it might be too complex for the kindergartners.
And I said, wait, wait.
We're doing chemical reactions, and the kindergartners
are my enzymes.
I need them as part of the--
[LAUGHTER]
--as part of the group.
And so we have dodgeballs, but I don't know how
to teach without a dodgeball.
So we have dodgeballs, and we're passing dodgeballs,
and we're doing chemical reactions.
And the kindergartners are great,
and the kindergartners are loving it.
And at the end--
not to sound like bragging-- some of the kids
get in the auditorium.
They get to their feet, and they're on their feet,
and they're cheering, because they had such a good time.
And hopefully, they learned some about chemical reactions.
And then, at the end, the principal says, you know,
that's actually not how we treat guests.
You're supposed to clap your hands
and thank your guests that way.
And I was thinking--
I never said anything, but I was thinking
to myself-- that's exactly how you want to celebrate science.
You want to be on your feet and cheering
for learning about, basically, how the process of the world
works.
And so I'm co-chair of this PK-12 action group.
And our goal is to think about and revolutionize
how kids learn STEM education and the role in STEM education.
We already have many--
I'm very interested in curriculum development.
We do professional development.
Vijay already talked about, the CLIx Project.
We have a NASA project called N-ABLE and the project
that I call Quantum Learning, because I think
that learning is quantized.
And I can imagine where we can take the very best of what
we teach our undergraduates at MIT
and back it out for our very youngest learners,
and give them the ability to think about solving
the most pressing problems on the planet
now, instead of having to wait to decide whether they want
to do that in high school or how they want to do it in college.
And so I think that's the last thing that I have.
Is it possible to get to my--
I have backup slides.
OK.
I call it Mission Possible-- empowering kids
to be the scientists, engineers, and innovators of the future.
And that's what I really want your help with.
These were backup slides.
So the poll--
I have two poll questions.
My first poll questions is how can alumni contribute to the PK
through 12 initiative?
I think you're supposed to write in here.
So you guys are--
you love MIT or you wouldn't be here today.
You most likely had a great educational experience here.
How can we pass that on?
How can we give that experience to every child in America,
every child in the world?
And so if you have ideas of how you'd
like to contribute to that, we'd like to know about it.
That's our first one.
Do I just let it keep going?
Just one.
Just one, OK.
The other one is not a formal poll, I guess.
But it also relates to a question
you heard earlier, which is, can you think about when you first
got excited about STEM education science or engineering, what
age that was?
I know I was about four or five years old.
I remember it.
I remember thinking, I want to be an inventor.
I want to do something that's important for the world.
And so I wanted to poll you-- you can come up and tell me
later when that was-- but what first
got you really excited about the field that you're in now,
and how we can take that experience
and help translate it to other kids.
I'm not saying that every child in the world
should be a scientist or engineer.
But can you imagine a world where every child in the world,
understands the world around them and understands energy,
understands personalized health care?
So I'm not looking at my time, but I'm going
to call that the end of mine.
And thank you for your attention,
and thank you so much for coming and being
a part of this technology day.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.
Thanks again for joining us.
For more information on future MIT Alumni Association
productions, please visit our website site.