We want to put great experiments and great ideas into action.

Dylan Dinçer, age 8, reacts to the demonstration of electromagnetism by professor Lourenço Pires of EECS. Credit: Dominick Reuter

This site was built around a simple idea: K12 educators and MIT should be working together to make movies. No one would argue that STEM education in the U.S. is in tough shape. Teachers want to do something about it, and so do MIT students.

Well, here's your chance.

• Educators can submit ideas for experiments or demonstrations they would like to see an MIT student perform and explain in a short video (5-10 minutes long) that will be made available online.
• MIT students can then "check out" these assignments (in the library sense of that phrase) — or they can come up with their own ideas and check them out themselves.

To help our students accomplish their task, MIT will provide equipment, guidance, support, and compensation for students to make the videos — but that will only get us so far. Our students need to hear from classroom experts and deliver videos that suit their needs. MIT students probably don't know, for example, which concepts in high school physics are especially difficult to convey to students, or which ones might be better conveyed with the right piece of experimental equipment. We want to help educators with great ideas but less-than-great facilities, and those with perfectly adequate facilities who would benefit from a collaboration with the best part of MIT — its students.

EDUCATORS

• If you have an idea for an assignment, have a look through ideas that have already been suggested. If you see a submission from someone else that you like — give it a heart. The categories, themes, and grade levels should be helpful ways of navigating through what's already in here (if not, let us know).
• If you can't find anything that matches your needs or your areas of expertise, go to Create Assignment, create an account, and send us your idea.
• After you've created an account, you will have access to much more within the site — you'll be able to communicate directly with the MIT student/s who accepts your assignment/s, comment on other educators' assignments, make suggestions on completed videos, etc.

MIT STUDENTS

MIT Facilities crew members put in an extra few hours to help the students filming "A Turn of the Earth" in Barker Library in Building 10, directly beneath MIT's great dome. Credit: Michele McDonald

• See above — we're talking about you, and some of what's up there applies to you, too.
• Have a look around in the open assignments to see what has been suggested. If you see something you like, submit a comment and connect with the teacher, or just go ahead and submit a proposal to create a video.
• If you can't find something you like, suggest your own idea and a proposal to make a video about it.
• If you have any questions about the process, have a look at the MIT Student Resources page for help on training, proposing a video, submitting it, getting paid, etc.
• Talk to your friends about this. The best videos we've seen so far haveall come out of ad hoc collaborations — groups of students with complementary strengths who have found each other and worked together. Think about submitting a set of ideas that could add up to a collection of videos…
• When your proposal to make a video is accepted, you will be notified — as will the person (if it isn't you) who suggested it.
• MIT students will be paid $1,000 for a completed and accepted video.

The processes on this website are intended to be as simple and straightforward as possible. It remains, however, a work in progress. If you have suggestions for how we can streamline or improve its components and processes, please let us know...