Boundaries
Boundaries may be territorial, cultural, biological, and political, but at MIT they are anything but barriers. The MIT community confronts and transcends boundaries of all sorts by venturing into virtual worlds, exploring the limits of gravity, and plumbing the Earth for energy resources. Read on to learn how MITers go beyond limits and seek new frontiers.
Virtual Worlds
A Scratch card showing kids how to create moving animation using the software. Scratch was developed by the Lifelong Kindergarten group at the MIT Media Lab in partnership with a network of collaborators.
Scratch teaches kids about design and computation
The educational programming language produced by the MIT Media Lab allows users to create interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art and share them online.
Earn game designer credentials by playing The Restaurant Game
The MIT Media Lab project will algorithmically combine the gameplay experiences of thousands of players to create a new game that will be entered into the 2008 Independent Games Festival. Everyone who plays will be credited as a game designer.
Boston Game Jam pushes developers' limits
In January, game developers met at the MIT Education Arcade for the first annual Boston Game Jam. In 36 hours, they completed eight games. View some of the results and read coverage.
Alumni-developed games
Harmonix—music-based games including Karaoke Revolution and Guitar Hero founded by Alex Rigopulos '92 and Eran Egozy '95.
Emotiv Systems—neuro-technology that allows games to be controlled and influenced by the player's mind via sensors tuned to the brain's natural electric signals. Cofounded by Allan Snyder EE '65.
Spacewar!—one of the earliest video games for a digital computer created in 1961 by members of the Tech Model Railroad Club, led by Stephen Russell '60.
Zork—text adventure game designed by Marc Blank '75 and Dave Lebling '71.
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy—Infocom game developed in the 1980s by Steven Eric Meretzky '79.
Terminus—award-winning game written by Sande Chen '92, who's also co-author of Serious Games: Games That Educate, Train, and Inform (2005), executive director of Girls in Games, a non-profit organization that encourages girls and women to enter the industry, and writer of the blog Dame Dev.
MIT game industry alumni email list
To subscribe, log on to the Infinite Connection and go to Mail Groups.
MIT Press
Play Between Worlds: Exploring Online Game Culture
By T. L. Taylor
Me++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City
By William J. Mitchell
Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds
By Jesper Juul
OpenCourseWare: Ethics and the Law on the Electronic Frontier
Law, policy, and technology as they relate to the evolving controversies over control of the Internet.
Defying Gravity
Engineers create SpaceNet—the supply chain
The tool is meant to help NASA establish a long-term human presence on the moon.
See Your Name in Space
Support a ground-breaking student research satellite to be launched in 2010 by MIT and Georgia Tech by uploading content to be printed on the spacecraft. Use your "space in space" to fly your name, signature, corporate logo, photograph, or other MIT-approved imagery.
MIT juggling clubs are open to all
Check out the MIT Juggling Club, the oldest drop-in juggling club in continuous operation in the world, and the Aero-Disastro club.
Bringing revolutionary thinking to the marketplace, then the stars
An MIT Enterprise Forum global broadcast linked bold research ideas to practical applications.
Research tests human limits in space
Professor Dava Newman AA '89 takes a multidisciplinary approach to gauge the effects of gravity and space travel on humans, melding aerospace bioengineering, biomechanics, life sciences, systems analysis and design, and more.
Alumnus seeks a private path to space
Entrepreneur Peter Harry Diamandis '83, founder of the X Prize, builds organizations to create the technology, marketplace, and leadership to pry open the final frontier.
OpenCourseWare
Space Biomedical Engineering & Life Support
Explores fundamentals of human performance, physiology, and life support impacting engineering design and aerospace systems.Space Policy Seminar
Investigates national security, civil, and commercial space policies including International Space Station choices, commercial launch from foreign countries, and the fate of satellite-based cellular systems.
What's Quick Take?
A bimonthly feature created by the MIT Alumni Association relating contemporary topics to personal life, work, and MIT culture. View the archive.
Subscribe for publication alerts.
Maps
GreenMap MIT
Plots environmental and cultural resources, such as recycling centers, community gardens, and landfills.
MIT-specific maps
- Gardens and courtyards summer and autumn tour
- Subterranean campus
- Public sculpture tour
- The coding behind the MIT campus map
- iSpots real-time campus wireless usage
Broad Institute genetic maps
MIT's Web design toolkit
Learn about creating image maps
Ten Secrets of Urban Design
Insights from urban design Professor Dennis Frenchman CP '76.
MIT Sea Grant invasive species of New England
Map shows where more than 70 organisms have been located.
Historical and current views of Boston
Including population, income, and ancestry maps.
The Geographic Information Systems (GIS) lab
Offers training and tools for integrating a wide variety of data types, such as scientific and cenus data, onto maps.
MIT Press: Walking Tours of Boston's Made Land
By Nancy S. Seasholes
Twelve walks that trace the creation of the city's man-made land in the central waterfront, Back Bay, South End, and more.
Mapping the tragedy of war
View maps of Baghad transposed onto the greater Boston Area, and learn about Media Arts and Sciences grad student Alyssa Wright's performance technology backpack/GPS project conveying the shock of war.
Send comments and questions to:
quicktake@mit.edu
Photo: ©iStockphoto.com/Felix Möckel
Border Crossings
Global MIT
An interactive resource showing how MIT impacts the world.
Spectrum: Beyond Borders
Learn how MIT is educating a new generation of global leaders and citizens
Program, competition seek to bridge Israeli-Palestinian divide
The MEET summer educational program, taught by MIT students and alumni, fosters connections between Israeli and Palestinian high school students through an interest in technology. The Just Jerusalem competition offers MIT fellowships to those proposing the best solutions in four aspects of city infrastructure: physical, economic, civic, or symbolic. Deadline: Dec. 31.
Students bridging cultural boundaries
Hapa mixed-ethnicity club
Oori Korean drum and dance troupe
Culture Shock student Web zine
Written, designed, and edited by first-year MIT students in an introductory writing course, the zine investigates how popular culture shapes experience.
First international president leads the Alumni Association
Martin Tang GM '72 views himself as a president sans frontières.
Professor sizes up competition in new book
Professor Suzanne Berger and an MIT team conducted a large-scale analysis of globalization for How We Compete: What Companies Around the World Are Doing to Make It In Today's Global Economy.
MIT World: Leading Across Boundaries
Scholars and professionals discussing the importance of leadership spanning economic, political, and cultural differences.
Exploring educational frontiers
MIT President Emeritus Chuck Vest HM discusses the future of engineering education on MIT World and writes about MIT and the role of research universities in his book Pursuing the Endless Frontier.
OpenCourseWare: Territorial Conflict
A political science graduate seminar investigating why conflicts arise and sometimes lead to war.
MISTI spans the globe
Each year, more than 200 students intern, research, and study abroad through the MIT International Science and Technology Initiatives. Students can travel to any of eight countries, including the newest program in Mexico.
Learning and maintaining languages
The Indigenous Language Initiative in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy provides master's-level training to native speakers of endangered languages seeking to keep their languages alive.
MIT's Foreign Languages and Literatures section is using podcasting to provide students with more frequent and non-traditional ways to learn new languages.
MIT Press: Democracy across Borders
By James Bohman
An innovative conception of democracy for an era of globalization: rule by peoples across borders.
Pursuing Research Frontiers
Focus on energy
Panel backs heat mining as key U.S. energy source
An MIT panel has concluded that a substantial portion of U.S. energy needs could be met by mining geothermal resources, likely with minimal environmental impact.Storing CO2 below ground may prevent polluting above
A new MIT-led analysis describes a mechanism for capturing carbon dioxide emissions from power plants and injecting the gas into the ground for safe storage.Transistor technology reaches beyond silicon's limits
Within 10-15 years, the silicon transistors key to iPods, laptops, and more could reach their size and performance limits, but MIT researchers are working with improved semiconductor materials.MIT provides options for a carbon-constrained world
An MIT report suggests ways to use coal in a more environmentally friendly way to help meet the world's energy needs.
MIT shows how blood cells change shape, penetrate capillaries
Researchers have developed a molecular-level model that describes how red blood cells deform their normal shape to pass through vessels that are often much narrower than the cells themselves.
Research plumbs ocean depths
A new microbe center joins scientists from MIT and other institutions to explore ocean microbes while other MIT researchers are using kayaks to test marine robotics that could one day perform dangerous underwater work.
AgeLab founder outlines new lives for elders
The houses of the future will monitor our bodily functions through sensors that relay the data to drugstores and health professionals.
OpenCourseWare: Aerodynamics of Viscous Fluids
Focuses on boundary layers and boundary layer theory subject to various flow assumptions, such as compressibility, turbulence, dimensionality, and heat transfer.
New center to explore quantum information theory
MIT's new $3.5 million W. M. Keck Foundation Center for Extreme Quantum Information Theory boosts MIT theorists in the international race to determine the ultimate capabilities of quantum information systems.
