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MICHAEL SIMA: Chemistry is not an abstract concept to me.
It's the most important tool in my toolkit to come up with new
inventions.
And that's what I do day in and day out at MIT.
I'm Michael Cima.
I've been at MIT for 25 years.
I'm a educator, researcher, mentor, and an inventor.
The course that I'm working on at MIT is called 3.091x.
And it's the Introduction to Solid State Chemistry.
It's been taught at MIT as a GIR for over 40 years.
And it's an extremely unique course.
You can't get this course anywhere else in the world.
Our goals for 3.091x are a very simple.
We want you at the end of this course to know all the same, exactly the
same, chemical principals you would in any university chemistry course,
except that you've learned them from the point of view of the solid state.
The examples we use have to do with the solids, the materials that you
work with every day.
And that's important, because our hypothesis is it's easier for you to
understand and to use these chemical concepts if you can relate them to the
materials around you.
Understanding of solid state principles has
transformed all of our lives.
I'm 53 years old.
In my lifetime I've witnessed everything change, from
communications, transportation, energy, everything.
And it all has been, at its heart, centered on discoveries in the solid
state sciences.
If you think about semiconductors, for instance, the basic concepts of what
makes semiconductors work are the kind of thing we study in 3.091.
The chemical concepts that make semiconductors work, that are at the
heart of the Information Age, are what we study.
Teaching a class at MIT is a little bit different than
anywhere else in the world.
And teaching it through 3.091x is going to be different, also.
But the most important rule that I use is we don't actually teach anything.
We help you discover something.
And so the rule that we'll have in building the 3.091x platform is how do
we help students discover solid state chemistry, not teach them anything,
but guide them through their own discovery of what I think is a very
important science.