MIT’s SPARK offers students in Grades 7 and 8 a variety of short, interesting classes on the MIT campus over one weekend, March 16-17. The registration lottery is open now through 5PM on March 5, and until that deadline all course preferences will be treated equally in the lottery. After that, any remaining seats will be open first-come/first-served. Students may choose from over 200 courses and must register on their own. For a full schedule, rank your top 3 classes and star at least 10 classes per time block. A $40 fee covers two days of classes and lunch and lots of walk-in activities. Generous financial aid is available. For more information not covered here, email spark@mit.edu. Here are 88 STEM courses offered:
- Wearable Code: Introduction to Microcontroller Programming
- Crash Course in Graph Algorithms
- Learn to Make Maps!
- Parallel Computing
- Fundamentals of a Browser
- How to think like a computer
- Intro to Game Design and Development
- Introduction to Programming via Javascript Animation
- Spreadsheets 101
- Computational Music Theory
- Introduction to Octave Programming
- Intro to Circuits and Coding with Arduino
- Are You Smarter Than an MIT Student?
- Why Sparks Spark: Electricity, down to the Atomic Level!
- Radiation Detector Introduction
- Prototyping 101 featuring Fabulous Foamcore
- Design / Build / Fly
- how 2 rocket
- Polymers 101
- Everything you want to know about nuclear power
- Rat Race
- Solving Problems big and small: A hands-on Design Thinking workshop
- Philosophical Issues in Brain Science (1 and 2)
- Microbiome 101: What’s in your poop?
- Introduction to Expansion Microscopy
- Sink or Swim (or Float!): Plankton Ecology
- Underrated Organs of the Human Body
- The Brain & Mind
- Endosymbiosis+
- Exploring Ocean Life: From Mangroves to the Marianas
- CRISPR: Hacking the Genome
- Introduction to Evolutionary Biology
- Evolution Revolution: Why Darwin Was Wrong
- Molecular Machines: Proteins in Action!
- Awesome Things About Cells
- Inside the brain: Dissecting brain injuries
- Rare diseases: understanding how your body functions
- Immunology
- Play + Test = playtesting an ecology game from the MIT Education Arcade
- Biology in the Amazon
- 23 & You
- Evolutionary Psychology: Why we act in the way we do
- Geometry
- Generating FUNctions
- Concepts of Differential and Integral Calculus
- Cellular Automata
- Surreal Numbers and Games
- Infinity
- Fractal Dimensions
- Intro to Cryptology
- Mathcounts Bootcamp
- Vectors!
- Language and logic
- How to (Mathematically) Guard an Art Gallery
- Computability Theory
- Old School Math
- Disease Modeling
- Information and the Redundancy of English
- Quick Mafs
- Finite Automata
- Probability in Video Games
- Cocker’s Arithmetick: How Math Used To Be Taught
- how to ??? profit: game theory
- Probability Puzzles
- The Principle of Explosion
- Games of Math
- Divide and Conquer
- Making Waves
- A Brief Tour of the Stratosphere
- What is Color?
- Stars, Galaxies, and Cosmology: An Introduction to Astronomy
- Introduction to Computational Chemistry
- What is Physics?
- A Brief History of Physics
- Atomic Theory I: The Basics
- Black Holes!
- Atomic Theory II: Modern Concepts
- An Introduction to Chemistry through Memes
- Special Relativity
- Atomic Theory III: Mostly Particle Physics
- What’s in our bins?
- Clouds!
- Everyday Physics Experiments to Measure Fundamental Constants of Nature
- Scale of the Solar System: How big is Uranus really?
- Eyes: Stereoscopic Insights
- Science of Baking
- Science Like a Girl
- Candy Chemistry