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I’ll be teaching a class at splash in November for my favorite demographic - high school students. If you aren’t familiar with splash:
One weekend in November, over one thousand high school and middle school students converge on the MIT campus, where MIT students and community members teach them short classes on just about anything you can think of!
During Splash, students can “get their feet wet” with a short introduction to any number of subjects — things they always wanted to learn, or topics they never knew existed. Or they can “dive head first” into an in-depth seminar or intensive workshop. They can even do some of both!
And this class is:
C691: Introduction to Creative Synthesis
The ideal of creative synthesis is that the process of creation is intellectually, mechanically, and socially a synthetic collaboration, frames our work. Humans are users of tools and, philosophically, the perceived uniqueness of this trait has defined our understanding of ourselves since the beginning of time. Tools have become increasingly complex, from a chipped stone ax to a web programming interface shared across millions. With rare exceptions everything we do, and everything we do it with, has been constructed by the collaboration and synthesis of thousands of others working before us.
This class will attempt to understanding the social, technological, and philosophical implications of creative synthesis and the current trends of synthetic collaboration on the web. We will survey technology (and seeming untechnology) as examples of the acts and artifacts of creative synthesis. Coupled with this we will focus on understanding web programming as a medium for creative synthesis, and collaboratively construct a web application by focusing on what and why, with a little bit of how.
Teaching is a great exercise. The act of preparation in teaching requires you to fully understand an idea, reduce it to its base principles, and develop illustrative examples. Teaching to this demographic in particular has some interesting aspects:
Advantages to teaching high school students.
- Tend to be overly motivated.
- May have controlling parents who force them to do work.
- Haven’t learned how to do things badly.
- Will work for college recs.
Disadvantages to teaching high school students.
- Haven’t learned how to do.
- Need extra guidance and attention.
- Requires an extremely long wait before you can go out for drinks after a successful project (3-5 years, ouch).