[music and students singing] "Marky on the Mic"
[voice of Polina Anikeeva] 3.024 is called electronic optical magnetic properties of materials.
It's a class about our modern world.
[music and voice of Polina Anikeeva] "Welcome back to 3.024."
[student singing] "My homie's name is Batman and he's an awesome hero."
You take a device, you know, you pick this thing,
and it's full of electronic optical magnetic structures
nothing inside this device is from the classical world
everything about this device is quantum
and the way we teach 3.024 is
we start from the very basic
and we teach them quantum mechanics and then solid state physics
and then on top of that foundation we teach the material science
of electronic optical magnetic properties.
"Pull it, and the features that you have to find are..."
[Student singing] "He's just a good guy, he will save a stranger..."
I like superheroes a lot. When I taught 3.024 for the first time
in the spring of 2012, instead of having a review session in the last lecture we had
a common battle where all students had to
create comics about the course materials
featuring as many concepts from the class as possible
and superheroes from their favorite universes.
[student singing] "He knows his Hamiltonian, he knows how energy behaves..."
[voice of Polina Anikeeva] We kept that tradition going so all our midterms and finals
are always written in superhero comic book novels.
And in 2016 when Iwas asked to
create an MITx and Edx class we had to create an original universe
because we didn't want to get into copyright troubles.
So those are the problem sets.
So basically we had all the lectures recorded, all problem sets available.
When the pandemic struck and we had to go online
in the residential platform the in-person component was gone.
that said, we had beautifully recorded lectures and
my thought was that students would be encouraged to watch
the lectures and then people could come and discuss the lecture.
That was a total failure. I showed up to my first online lecture
and no one watched anything, so I switch on Zoom whiteboard
and I start giving my normal lecture.
That was Monday. Wednesday comes up, same thing.
Friday same thing.
So rather than trying to do any kind of enforcements I polled the class
and an overwhelming majority preferred live lecture.
And that was really surprising because
I was essentially teaching a white blank page
and somehow they still liked it better than watching the recorded sessions.
[student singing] "It's too bad for you Mr. Superman, your laser eyes just won't do."
[voice of Polina Anikeeva] We still maintain the design reviews
we still had them working in teams, we still held traditional closed book exams.
[student singing] "His unique personality is a quantum superposition"
[voice of Polina Anikeeva] The students loved Slack.
A thing that I think made that Slack channel so active and so popular
was the responsiveness of the teaching team.
[student singing] "Go back to Mathematica and run your code again".
I had a graduate student TA to support
the big computational aspect, the design reviews
and then I had two undergraduate half TA's that taught recitations
but I also had people who worked with me in previous years
volunteer their time and joined that Slack channel so that they could answer
more questions from more students.
So I had a whole group of people
wanting that class to succeed and they did
as well, if not better, than in previous years.
[student singing] "Ant Man surpasses what's classical, and easily enters quantum,
and Dr. Strange, who's kind of independent, I've to to say is equally awesome!"
[voice of Polina Anikeeva] I always love teaching because I get to
interact with students and I get to experience their energy.
If we watch them kind of struggle in front of us with a problem
we would have seen that moment of clarity
but it's really difficult to experience that on Zoom.
It's a little bit ironic because we rely on the technology governed by
everything we learn in that class.
But 3.024 is just so much more than the material.
It's growing up. It's taking something that's really really hard
and learning to work at a very different level of intellectual maturity.
For me at least the community made all the difference because we all could help each other
and realize that we're in it together.
[student singing] "Okay, we clearly see both sides measure up without complete collapse"
[student singing] "But honestly, the energy of DC just has too many large band gaps."