A photo an open book with hands holding it.

Explore the Humanities and Social Sciences!

You may not know that MIT offers an astounding array of humanities, arts, and social science courses! We provide a curated list of these courses that are of interest to high school educators, students, and parents.

Featured Resource

 

Two hands are writing on a white background. Each fingernail is painted bright green, and the writing surface has chemical formulas written in black, blue, and red.
Jessica Harrop describes the chemistry involved in the "Money to Burn" demonstration.

Chemistry Behind the Magic: Chemical Demonstrations for the Classroom

 

Chemistry Behind the Magic features videos of exciting live chemistry demonstrations. The videos are enhanced by explanations of the science behind the demonstration, in a fun and easy to understand format. Videos include “Money to Burn” where the chemist “burns” a dollar bill and “Death of a Gummy Bear” in which we see how much energy it takes for a gummy bear to combust.

 

Chemistry Behind the Magic

 

Featured Video Course

A large piece of equipment floating in space.
Photo courtesy of NASA.

Chandra Astrophysics Institute

The Chandra Astrophysics Institute was a program held on the MIT campus for students in grades 9-11 to train for and undertake astronomy projects. The program is organized into six different investigations, and we have published lesson plans, assessment ideas, teacher tips, videos, and image galleries for you to explore. One goal of publishing this on Highlights for High School was to help other teachers who would like to replicate a similar program in their school. Come learn more about the Chandra X-Ray space telescope!

 

Chandra Astrophysics Institute

 

Featured Story

A highly gifted student, Jamie had been taking his high school’s advanced math and science courses since seventh grade, so it’s no surprise that he’d exhausted major portions of their STEM curriculum. That’s when his parents turned to MIT OpenCourseWare. They wanted to use OCW’s 18.02SC Multivariable Calculus as a full-credit course.

 

 

 

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Highlights for High School features MIT OpenCourseWare materials that are most useful for high school students and teachers.

For Students 

For Teachers