Tag: Hands-on Discovery

  • Science & Tech

    Redesigning design contests

    A Harvard conference on design competitions — which can be creative, ubiquitous, and troubling — lays out the present controversies surrounding them, and some solutions.

  • Science & Tech

    Crafting ultrathin color coatings

    In Harvard’s high-tech cleanroom, applied physicists produce vivid optical effects — on paper.

  • Arts & Culture

    Foreshadowing feminism

    Organizing and canvassing for anti-slavery petitions by women from 1833 to 1845 was a transformational training ground for suffragettes and other social activists following the Civil War.

  • Nation & World

    The mystery of the lake

    From a single study of methyl mercury in Mexico’s largest freshwater lake, a constellation of projects has grown, all of them centered on children and environmental health.

  • Science & Tech

    An introduction to rebuilding the body

    A new course at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences is bringing students up to speed on biomedical engineering, preparing them to contribute to University research, pursue summer internships, or take an idea conceived in the classroom to the next stage of development.

  • Science & Tech

    When engineering meets art

    Music blared, LEDs blinked, and jaws dropped Tuesday at the SEAS Design and Project Fair, a celebration of creative problem-solving by students at the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences…

  • Science & Tech

    Books meet bytes

    Experts came together at Radcliffe to peer into the future of digital library collections.

  • Science & Tech

    Less energy, more creativity

    Two teams of students at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design provided a close look — part celebration, part cerebration — at two house designs that won international competitions.

  • Arts & Culture

    ‘The Thinking Hand’

    A visit by a master of traditional Japanese carpentry launches an unusual Harvard exhibit of tools, techniques, and woods that have been used for centuries.

  • Science & Tech

    Can iPads help students learn science? Yes

    A new study by researchers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics shows that students grasp the unimaginable emptiness of space more effectively when they use iPads to explore 3-D simulations of the universe, compared with traditional classroom instruction.

  • Campus & Community

    Gripes between bites

    A Pusey Library exhibit, “Dining and Discontentment,” is just one of many at Harvard that illustrate the power of investigating material artifacts in order to understand the past.

  • Nation & World

    Northern exposure

    Harvard Kennedy School Professor Michael Ignatieff talks about why he put aside academia to make an improbable and ill-fated foray into Canadian politics.

  • Campus & Community

    Dining in the dark

    Nick Hoekstra, a blind student at the Graduate School of Education, devised a three-course meal for 30 students, an affair called “Dining in the Dark.”

  • Health

    Three days, three wild finds

    Tim Laman, an associate of Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology and an award-winning wildlife photographer, was part of a two-man team that helicoptered into a remote Australian rainforest earlier this year, coming out with three new species: two lizards and a frog.

  • Science & Tech

    Engineering a better life

    When Kathy Ku ’13 proposed to build a water-filter factory in Uganda for $15,000 last year, her contacts advised her to double her budget. If all goes to plan, by next August Ku and her classmates will have created a fully functional and self-sustaining water-filter factory, supplying clean water at half the cost of imported…

  • Arts & Culture

    The digital Dickinson

    Houghton Library and Harvard University Press are two of the leading partners in the new Emily Dickinson Archive, a joint venture with other institutions that brings together most of her poem manuscripts.

  • Arts & Culture

    When all turn right, go left

    Avant-garde visual artist Robert Wilson delivered a talk at the Graduate School of Design, and jarred his audience into new imaginative spaces.

  • Nation & World

    Windows on the world

    On Thursday, alumni, students, faculty, and staff honored Paul and Harriet Weissman for supporting the international program, named after them, that sends College students oversees to work and experience life.

  • Science & Tech

    The watchword is innovation

    Innovation, whether it’s large, small, solo, or institutional, is an increasingly important part of Harvard, a university working to maintain its clearly defined sense of self and at the same time evolve to meet future needs.

  • Science & Tech

    Where students own their education

    The class Applied Physics 50 is grounded in a teaching philosophy that banishes lectures and encourages hands-on exploration, presenting a collection of best practices gleaned from decades of teaching experience and studious visits to college physics classrooms nationwide.

  • Nation & World

    Cooperating in educating

    The Harvard Campaign will help support growing advancements in interdisciplinary collaboration and integrated knowledge across the University.

  • Science & Tech

    A higher plane

    Research by scientists in Elizabeth Spelke’s lab suggests our innate understanding of abstract geometry has origins in the evolutionary past.

  • Nation & World

    Unraveling Maya mysteries

    For decades, Harvard’s Bill Fash and his wife, Barbara, have worked in Copán, Honduras, to restore, preserve, and protect Maya culture and history for future generations.