"Structure of Materials" is a Course materials drawn from MIT Open Learning and catalogued under Chemistry for Undergraduate / College. From the source: Structure—or the arrangement of materials’ internal components—determines virtually everything about a material: its properties, its potential applications, and its performance within those applications. This three-part course explores the structure of a wide variety of materials… Slide Collection preserves the upstream link, the original creator credit and the licensing terms; download the file to use it in a classroom, study group or revision plan.
About this presentation
Structure—or the arrangement of materials’ internal components—determines virtually everything about a material: its properties, its potential applications, and its performance within those applications. This three-part course explores the structure of a wide variety of materials with current-day engineering applications. Taken together, the three modules provide similar content to MIT’s sophomore-level materials structure curriculum. Part 1 of the course introduces amorphous materials and explores glasses and polymers, the factors that influence their structure, and how materials scientists measure and describe the structure of these materials. Then we discuss what it means for a material to be crystalline, how we describe periodic arrangement of atoms in a crystal, and how we can determine the structure of crystals through x-ray diffraction. Parts 2 and 3 explore the structure of materials in further depth. This course was organized as a three-part series on MITx by MIT’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering and is now archived on the Open Learning Library, which is free to use. You have the option to sign up and enroll in each module if you want to track your progress, or you can view and use all the materials without enrolling.
How to study this deck
Chemistry decks layer micro and macro views of matter. Watch for the moment a slide shifts from molecular drawings to bulk reaction equations — that transition is usually where misconceptions enter. Re-read those slides twice.
Undergraduate viewers should treat this as a scaffolding for deeper reading — the slides outline the territory, but the textbook chapters and primary sources remain the actual content.
Five questions to test your understanding
- What is the single most important claim on the first three slides, and what evidence is offered for it?
- Which slide could you remove without losing the argument? Which slide is load-bearing?
- Where does the deck switch from definitions to applications? Mark that transition.
- What would a student who already disagreed with the conclusion need to see to be convinced?
- Which two slides, if combined, would give the clearest one-slide summary of the whole deck?
Where this deck fits in the wider catalogue
Slide Collection classifies this presentation under Chemistry, alongside other openly-licensed material in the same subject. If you are preparing a unit at the Undergraduate / College level, the dedicated combined Chemistry · Undergraduate / College page is the fastest way to find adjacent decks with the same audience in mind.
Citation & reuse
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