Grasp

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The Learning Divide

It was the last day of February 2017, and Amos Winter, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at MIT, was warning the group of sophomores in his afternoon lab section about the destructive potential of their batteries. Though supposedly safe, in the unlikely event of a sudden discharge, each of the lithium polymer batteries scattered on the conference table possessed enough energy to maim, even kill.

How much energy, exactly? Go ahead ­slam it into a calculator, he said. After approximately ten seconds, anyone who had worked it out was keeping the answer to herself, so Winter bounded over to a whiteboard. You know the capacity of the battery, he explained, which came labeled in units of milliampere hours. You basically just add in time to figure out energy in joules, he said, and in short order, the answer was on the board: 13,320 joules. That s the equivalent to lifting a Honda Civic ten meters off the ground, he said. Imagine a Honda Civic falling on your hand ­that s the kind of damage an exploding lithium polymer battery could inflict. If the casing on such a battery begins to bubble, he said, chuck it in one of the lab s many sand buckets and run in the opposite direction.

In the absence of any such catastrophes, however, class would continue to hum along as it had for the first few weeks of the semester. In addition to the batteries, sitting on the table in front of each student was a simple robot ­two wheels and a skid designed to drag along the ground ­which would serve as a sort of training vehicle, in anticipation of the more complex robots the class would build later in the semester. On these practice bots, which Winter dubbed Mini-­Mes, the students would learn mechanical engineering principles ranging from simple to complex. They would start by learning to code a microcontroller (that is, a very small computer) to run an electric motor; later, they would instill in their Mini-­Mes the capacity to navigate

Sanjay Sarma with Luke Yoquinto

Compelling. . . . Delightful as well as convincing in its plea that educators place learning over winnowing and access over exclusivity. Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
 
A remarkable book, both lively and scholarly. I strongly recommend it for anyone interested in the history of ideas about learning and interested in improving teaching and learning. Henry L. Roediger III, coauthor of Make It Stick
 
An amazing book . . . The authors provide an overview of the neural and cognitive processes that support learning . . . They make a convincing case that students have an amazing capacity to learn. Robert A. Bjork, Distinguished Research Professor of Psychology, UCLA

Grasp is an absolute pleasure to read. . . . An important contribution to the literature on learning science and higher education change. . . . Grasp can provide the foundations of what learning science-informed teaching might look like, with some fantastic real-world examples. Joshua Kim, Inside Higher Ed

Sarma's book may be the most important work on education written this century. Chris Edwards, The Skeptic