Learning by Doing by Hala K. '29

I’m sorry that I basically disappeared off the face of the blogs. If it makes it any better, I think I basically disappeared off the face of everything for a while. I’ve had to catch up to a LOT of emails and Slack messages recently.

The past 2-ish months have been incredibly busy. Finals started on Friday, May 15th, and continued into the following Wednesday. By the time finals week actually began, I had already taken one exam and turned in two final papers the week before, which left me with two actual finals during finals week. 

And, coincidentally, both of those finals landed on the same day: the first day of finals, May 15. Lucky me!

But I figured, “At least I’ll be done so early compared to everyone else, and it’s only up from there!” Wrong. 

The first day of my summer internship was Monday, May 18th, ALL THE WAY IN SEATTLE. This meant that after studying for a week and taking two finals on Friday, I somehow needed to pack up my entire dorm room on Saturday and THEN, take a 5 AM, 6-hour flight to Seattle on Sunday morning.

Did any of that timeline make sense? I have edited this blog so many times and still don’t know how to make it clearer. Also, count how many times I used the word “finals” here.

I’m now writing this 7-ish weeks later, still in disbelief that I survived. But let’s focus on the positives… I FINISHED MY FIRST YEAR AT MIT. WOOOO EVERYONE CHEER!!

I have so many thoughts about my freshman year that I initially tried to fit into this blog, but I quickly realized that would be impossible. So, TLDR: it was great… and it was hard… but it was great!

Though one thing I’ve taken with me most is all the cool things I got to build. MIT’s motto is mens et manus, which translates from Latin to “mind and hand.” It’s meant to represent MIT’s dedication to learning by doing and the need for application alongside theory. 

Transparently, I had never thought much about the motto before. But as the new people I meet keep asking me, “How was your first year? How were the classes?” my mind keeps going back to it. So, here are the examples I keep coming back to:

The first few are from 6.1010 – Fundamentals of Programming. I LOVED THIS CLASS. Each week, we had a new lab, aka coding project, that we had to complete. And while some labs could be annoying, terrible, so long, make-you-want-to-rip-your-hair-out-then-drop-out… THEY WERE SO FUN⁠01 except Autocomplete... I NEVER enjoyed that one . Some of my favorites were:

SNEKOBAN!! All of my friends agree that this lab was PEAK. It was the first “game” that we made, so it was cool to know that we could code something and then actually watch it work. This lab was meant to teach us the importance of good game representation, like using a dictionary versus a list of lists.

MINESWEEPER DUPE!!! This is commonly referred to as the worst lab of the class, but I actually really enjoyed it. Unfortunately, it doesn’t have a flags feature, which made playing it tough. We made a 2-dimensional board and an N-dimensional board to practice recursion.

SNEK IS YOU!! This is a Baba is You dupe. It takes a minute to understand, but it is super fun to play. Coding it, however, was TERRIBLE because, while not shown in the video, objects can push and pull each OTHER. I still don’t fully get it?? This was the last lab of the class, so it was basically a test of all the skills we learned over the semester.

The next few are from 6.1903 – Introduction to Low-Level Programming in C & Assembly. This was a 6 week course and each week, we had a mandatory 2.5-hour class dedicated just to working on the lab. I remember taking way more videos than I apparently did, but LOOK:I got my name to display on an LED board using C and lots of bit operations! For the next couple of days, I found all of my friends with four-letter names, wrote their names down, and sent them photos.

SNAKE! I unfortunately only have this live photo of my friend Zaynab playing the game (I swear I had more videos, but I’ve looked EVERYWHERE). There are four buttons that act as arrow keys, so you can play Snake just as it’s played online. The apple is also randomly generated on the board at the start of each round.

This one was SUPER COOL. It looks simple, but it was a lot of fun to implement. It’s a scrolling text version of my earlier project, so I wasn’t limited to 4-letter words anymore. It needed to know which bits were coming off and which bits still needed to come on for each left shift. I sent the message in this video to my friends from home since we, embarrassingly enough, refer to ourselves as “squad.”

The last one I wanted to share was from 8.02 – Physics II: Electricity and Magnetism. We did labs often enough in this class that we actually had a take-home kit. My team voted me “most responsible” so I was tasked with taking care of it 😍. Unfortunately, I don’t have many videos of what we worked on… mostly because I was always lost about what was going on while my team carried me (shoutout Zaynab and Citlali, best team EVER) .

WE BUILT A MOTOR! This lab took a lot of fine-tuning, like placing the magnets in different orientations, changing the number of solenoids, and changing the distance of the solenoids. But when it finally worked, it was SO COOL. As someone who has used motors so often, it was really interesting to see how simple they are at their core. This project was intended to teach us about magnetic fields and the Lorentz force law.

The craziest part about all of this is that these projects are JUST from second semester – and only a tiny sample of even that. As I wrote this, I kept thinking of other things I could include, but I figured no one wants to scroll through 20 pages of projects I built.

It’s also funny because while I was working on a lot of these projects, I mostly remember thinking about all of the other stuff I had to get done besides them. At the time, I was usually just trying to get something that worked so I could turn it in and move on to the next assignment. I don’t think I ever really appreciated how fun they were until I showed these videos to other people and thought, “wait, that was actually kinda cool.”

I’m really excited for the many more hands-on projects to come. Next year, I’m also planning on signing up for makerspace access so that I can do more hands-on work in a non-class setting (side note – yes, I consider coding hands-on).